"The students in detention at Robert W. Coleman Elementary School in Baltimore aren’t staring at white walls—they’re meditating and practicing yoga as part of the Holistic Me after-school program.

Here’s how the project, created by the Holistic Life Foundation, works: Holistic Me hosts 120 male and female students in a program that runs from 2:30 to 5:30 p.m. and involves yoga, breathing exercises and meditative activities. Disruptive students are brought to the Mindful Moment Room for breathing practices and discussion with a counselor and are instructed on how to manage their emotions.

The project, which focuses on prekindergarten through fifth-grade students, approaches punishment in an entirely different way and reports an incredible result: zero suspensions in the last year. Comparatively, the 2013–2014 school year had four suspensions.

A different kind of timeout. 

"Yoga programs in public schools face backlash" [12/17/2012]

Parents opposed to the program say the classes will indoctrinate their children in Eastern religion and are not just for exercise.

Mary Eady pulled her first-grade son out of the classes.

Eady said she observed a kindergarten class in which the children did the motions referred to in yoga practices as a sun salutation. The folded over children, stood upright, sweeping up their arms toward the sky.

She said while the teacher called it an "opening sequence" the connotation was the same in her mind: Students were learning to worship the sun, which went against her Christian beliefs that only God should be worshipped.

"It will change the way you think," she said. "What they are teaching is inherently spiritual, it's just inappropriate therefore in our public schools."

Their attorney, Dean Broyles, says they are considering suing to halt the program.

Despite the long debate over prayer in school, constitutional law experts say the courts still have not clearly defined what constitutes religion.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/12/17/yoga-programs-in-public-schools-face-backlash.html

There's a difference between religion and philosophy.