The Sustainable Teacher Collective

The Story Behind the Work

Jennifer Caputo is a Sussex County Teacher of the Year, NJ State Teacher of the Year Finalist with over 25 years of experience in classrooms and professional development. She’s the founder of Calm & Cool School™ , The Tapping Community, and host of the Shift for Wellness Podcast where she helps educators, students, caregivers, and teams move from burnout to balance using nervous system-informed practices like breathwork, EFT, and trauma-sensitive reflection.

Her work is where research meets real life - informed by science, shaped by personal healing

Maybe you’ve felt it too... when your body says “SLOW DOWN!” but your brain says “KEEP GOING!”
I remember it vividly: standing in my kitchen, heart racing, shoulders tight, breath shallow staring at a calendar that never had any white space. I kept telling myself, “Just get through today.”
The problem was... I'd been just getting 'through today' for far too long.

Her body began to whisper...fatigue, tightness, snapping at loved ones. Then it begged... brain fog, exhaustion, and leaving school in an ambulance. She didn’t stop. Until her body did it for her... with a cancer diagnosis that changed everything.

In that moment, I realized: This stress is not all in my head. It’s in my system.

That realization became the heart of her mission: to teach others what she wished she’d known earlier - that stress isn’t the enemy; unprocessed stress is. And that we don’t need to push through to be powerful, we need to tune in, listen to the body, and pay attention to what it has to tell us.

Through her workshops and speaking, Jennifer now shares the tools that helped her heal: breathwork, tapping, nervous system literacy, and daily micro-resets. Her work is gentle, real, and rooted in the belief that wellness isn’t extra - it’s essential.