About 284 Palo Alto high school students will take guided mindfulness walks among the trees on their own campuses this fall, part of a new program from local nonprofit Canopy.

Five walks begin Monday, Sept. 28, at Gunn High School, reaching 134 students over two days. Five more are scheduled at Palo Alto High School on Monday, Oct. 19, for about 150 students. All take place during the regular school day.

Canopy, the Palo Alto tree-planting nonprofit founded in 1996, announced the expansion on Sept. 23. The 10 walks grow out of a summer pilot at Gunn where students practiced silent walking, box breathing, sensory awareness, observation exercises and journaling. They also used tree guides to identify species around campus.

Jean-Paul Renaud, Canopy's executive director, said the goal is to give students a lasting tool for stress. "Our hope is that a student facing a stressful exam … remembers that there is a tree outside their classroom where they can take a few minutes, breathe and find some peace," Renaud said in the announcement.

Student feedback from the summer pilot, collected by Canopy, was consistently positive. Participants described the walks as calming, peaceful and grounding. Several said they noticed details on campus they had walked past for years without seeing.

"The walk opened my mind to calmness," one student wrote in Canopy's post-walk survey. "Not being on the screen in nature is really relaxing. Things I never paid that much attention to suddenly had more value and beauty."

Another student said the experience "…helped me calm down and slow down" and that stressful thoughts "weren't on my mind as much." One wrote they had never used Gunn's trail before and realized "how easy it would be for me to come here and just walk for 20–30 minutes sometimes."

The program arrives as PAUSD grapples with persistent student stress. A district update in April described listening sessions at the high schools where students reported "a persistent sense of inadequacy, driven by the feeling that even high academic and extracurricular achievements are now considered the bare minimum."

Canopy has not said whether it plans to continue the walks beyond this fall. No PAUSD administrator has commented publicly on the program.

When asked how to improve the summer walks, students had one recurring request: more time.