In October 2017, the Route 91 Harvest Festival shooting left a profound impact on individuals, families, first responders, educators, and the broader Las Vegas community. In response, local leaders invited CMBM to bring its trauma healing and resilience-building model to Southern Nevada.

Following the Route 91 Harvest Festival shooting, Anne Weisman, PhD, Director of Wellness & Integrative Medicine at the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and UNLV leadership invited CMBM to help explore a comprehensive approach to community trauma and healing.

Our approach was grounded in a fundamental belief that communities recover not only through clinical services, but by ensuring that the people who live and work within those communities have accessible tools to care for themselves and one another.

Participants learned practical mind-body techniques to help regulate stress, increase self-awareness, build resilience, and strengthen connection.

In the years that followed, our work expanded throughout Southern Nevada.

Through partnerships with UNLV and community organizations, CMBM trained professionals and leaders from medicine, public health, social work, counseling, law enforcement, fire and emergency services, and other community-serving organizations.

In 2021, CMBM and UNLV expanded this collaboration through a broader initiative designed to bring trauma healing and resilience-building skills to professionals working across the community.

These trainings created a growing network of people who could integrate mind-body medicine into the settings where they were already serving others.

But as the work continued, one need became increasingly clear:

Educators were facing extraordinary levels of stress and burnout. Students were struggling with anxiety, behavioral challenges, emotional dysregulation, disconnection, and the lasting effects of trauma and chronic stress.

We saw an opportunity to move beyond one-time training and toward a more comprehensive approach that could help transform the culture of an entire school.

In 2022, through the generous support of the Agassi Foundation for Education, CMBM began partnering with educators in the Clark County School District to introduce practical, trauma-responsive mind-body skills that could be used in classrooms and throughout the school day.

Our work with teachers and school staff focused on an essential principle of our model:

In our workshops demonstrating experiential training, educators learned techniques that strengthened their own self-awareness, emotional regulation, stress management, empathy, and resilience. They then explored how to use these same practices to support their students and help create classrooms grounded in safety, connection, compassion, and trust.

As this work developed, it became clear that meaningful and sustainable change required more than training individual educators.

It required engaging the entire school community.

Today, that vision is taking shape through our most comprehensive school partnership to date at Orr Middle School in the Clark County School District, a campus of roughly 750 students.

In 2025, CMBM began working with Clark County School District leaders to identify a school interested in piloting a deeper, more sustained approach to trauma healing and resilience building. Orr Middle School’s leadership enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to work together to address some of the challenges facing students, educators, and families while strengthening connection and belonging across the school community.

Together, we are building an 18-month Community of Care initiative designed to weave trauma-responsive mind-body practices into the everyday life of the school.

The program is intentionally layered, reaching the entire school community while providing deeper training and ongoing mentorship to educators and student leaders.

We began by engaging school leadership, educators, and staff in conversations and workshops designed to better understand the unique needs, challenges, strengths, and aspirations of the Orr community.

Core faculty and staff participate in CMBM’s Children & Teens Intensive and Classroom Training, gaining a deeper understanding of trauma, early brain development, stress, emotional regulation, and the essential role of caring relationships.

Through experiential practice, participants learn practical mind-body skills they can use for themselves and integrate into their work with students. Ongoing mentorship supports educators as they put these practices into action.

Our work extends beyond staff training to engage students and families directly.

At Orr’s Back-to-School events, CMBM introduced incoming sixth-grade students and their families to mind-body medicine, helping extend the culture of care beyond the classroom and into the broader school community.

The next phase of the initiative brings the entire Orr Middle School community together through schoolwide workshops that introduce students, teachers, and staff to CMBM’s approach and practical techniques for managing stress and strengthening resilience.

A core group of seventh- and eighth-grade students will receive specialized training to become peer mentors and help strengthen a culture of safety, trust, and connection from within the student community.

By investing in young people as leaders, the initiative creates continuity for future cohorts and helps ensure that students themselves play an active role in shaping their school culture.

The Orr Middle School initiative represents the evolution of nearly a decade of learning and partnership in Southern Nevada.

What began as a response to collective trauma has grown into a more comprehensive vision: schools as communities of care.

Our goal is not simply to provide a workshop or train a small group of individuals. It is to work alongside school communities to create sustainable systems of support in which:

At Orr, this approach is reaching educators, students, families, and future peer leaders through a coordinated, long-term initiative designed to embed these practices throughout the school community. The larger vision is for Orr to serve as a flagship model, demonstrating what is possible when trauma-responsive, community-centered practices are woven into the life of a school and informing future expansion across Clark County and beyond.

The need for trauma healing and resilience building in schools has never been greater. But we also see an extraordinary opportunity.

Schools are more than places of academic learning. They are communities where young people spend a significant part of their lives, where relationships are formed, challenges are experienced, and the foundations for lifelong wellbeing can be strengthened.

Our work in Las Vegas has shown us the power of beginning with community, listening to local needs, and building the capacity of the people already caring for children and families.

From the aftermath of the Route 91 shooting to our partnerships with educators across Clark County, and now to the comprehensive Community of Care taking shape at Orr Middle School, this work continues to grow.

Our vision is to help schools become places where students and educators don’t simply learn how to succeed, but have the tools, relationships, and support they need to heal, regulate, connect, and thrive.

Orr Middle School is an important step toward that vision and a model we hope to bring to other schools and communities in need.