What’s Right with Our Schools: Nolan Elementary School, Acts of Kindness

SIGNAL MOUNTAIN, Tenn. (WDEF) — Learning how to be kind to others is a valuable lesson for children to learn. See how students at Nolan Elementary are taking it to heart. It’s a great example of what’s right with our schools.

“Acts of kindness are things that the kids are doing here at school,” said school counselor Debra Smart. “Some of the things that we’ve done: we’ve done school-wide projects, we did a grow your pumpkin back in the fall and we did grow your heart in January. This is a county-wide project that Hamilton County School initiated this school year, and it was just for schools to keep up with how many acts of kindness the kids do.

Smart said some students even take initiative as kindness ambassadors. Here are some of the things the students said about being a kindness ambassador:

“Being a kindness ambassador is a good thing. Because you get a chance to be kind to others and spread kindness and make the world a better place little by little,” fifth grader Luke Russell said.

“If you are a kindness ambassador you can be kind to others. And when you are kind to others, it spreads. And when it spreads, all the other people will be kind too,” said fifth grader Madeline Medeiros.

“It’s good to be kind, because people sometimes can hurt other people’s feelings and you want to be nice to other people, so they feel good. And not everybody’s just sad,” fifth grader Kendall Stutz said.

Smart believes the students want to be kind, and they show it.

“We have the nicest kids anywhere. They would do anything to help others. And as I said, the projects that we do are school-wide,” Smart said. “We do have kindness ambassadors. And these, this is a group of 25 students that at the beginning of the school year, wrote a short essay as to why they want to be kindness ambassadors. They have headed up the all the projects that we’ve done here for kindness. They’ve been in charge of everything they’ve come up with. They have come up with the ideas. They’ve checked in on teachers, made kept count of all the kindness acts. And every morning they go to the office, and we start our day off with kindness quotes.

Here is an example of one of their kindness quotes: “a great man shows his greatness by the way he treats the little men.”

“I hope what they’re getting out of it is the need to just always be kind,” Smart said. “And one of the things one of the other bulletin boards said, spread kindness like confetti. And I hope that they understand how important it is to just always wherever you go be kind.”