A Comprehensive Approach To Character Education: Nemaha Central Elementary and Middle School Free

The six pillars of character: trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring, and citizenship are the core ethical and performance values that provide the foundation of good character at NCEMS. Our vision is producing students of good character who will become productive, responsible citizens who will contribute positively to our society. Students who possess strong character skills show improvement in academic achievement, reduction in misbehavior, and improved social interactions with others. They also practice and develop skills through an active partnership with the community. Faculty and staff teach, enforce, advocate, and model these pillars of character by using a common language and setting high expectations that focus on developing these character skills in our students. Staff includes our secretaries, bus drivers, cooks, custodians, and paraprofessionals who spend time with the students developing positive relationships and impacting their character development.

We implemented our character education program by creating a character action plan for the 2012-13 school year. In-service training introduced the Character Counts! philosophy to the staff, and letters, newspaper, and website articles introduced it to the parents and community. We made it visible and verbal through the use of posters, signs, bulletin boards, student planners, classroom lessons, and middle school assemblies. We celebrated Character Counts week with a large assembly which included skits, a guest speaker, and T-shirts for all students and staff. We used common character language and tied all behaviors to the six pillars.

An in-service on ethics allowed staff to do a self-evaluation and work on improving their own character skills. By demonstrating good character skills in everything they do, staff are modeling and teaching the students the importance of our core values.

The enthusiasm for our approach was really ignited when a guest speaker, Trooper Todd Helm of the Kansas Highway Patrol, encouraged the students to “learn the pillars, earn the pillars, and don’t burn the pillars.” We realized that our students had quickly “learned” the pillars and could recite the six character traits and give a short definition and example of each of them. “Earning” the pillars became our next focal point. Earning the pillars meant putting the core values into action, and “not burning” the pillars meant living the core values as an important part of lifelong character development.

One of the most positive aspects of Character Counts! is the common language that is used when talking about our day-to-day experiences and applying them to the six pillars. We began using the “kindness pledge” every morning to remind our students and staff of the importance of practicing the core values, and our morning announcement greeting was, “Good morning kids of character!” which set the expectation for each day at our school. We revised our behavior notice so teachers had to indicate which pillar had been violated by the student’s misbehavior. Parents understand the emphasis placed on these core values and that it is followed through in everything students do.

No school is without challenges, and NCEMS is no exception. Challenges our school has faced include a recent consolidation of schools and a changing social culture. Two schools, Baileyville & St. Benedict in Baileyville, Kansas, and Nemaha Valley in Seneca, Kansas, were uniting to become Nemaha Central Schools. The Baileyville & St. Benedict buildings were closed, and the majority of students were transferred to the schools in Seneca. Another area school that closed at Bern, Kansas, brought an influx of students to our building as well. The character initiative we put in place aided the transition of school consolidation for our students and staff. Our theme for the next year was “Teaming Up for a Winning Season.” Our new mascot “Thunder” lent its name to a new character project called “Thunder All-Stars Making a Difference.” This program is part of the Character Counts! strategy and is a kindness project that teaches students and staff to pay it forward. It allows them to become positive forces in their school and community while promoting life-long social and character building skills. It has been one of our most successful character initiatives.

Our character action plan is updated and enhanced each year. We continue to teach and model the six pillars of character, and we have added other support resources including the Second Step curriculum in Grades pre-K-8. Second Step is a curriculum that allows the classroom teachers to teach social skills and problem-solving techniques that empower students to build better relationships with peers, staff, and others. We recognized the importance of teaching classroom and buildingwide behavior expectations, so we chose CHAMPS as our behavior framework. CHAMPS, based on the work of Randy Sprick et al. (2009), ties in well with our Character Counts! Initiative. We have continued the “Make a Difference” community projects which have grown to include fun activities like assisting in delivering Meals on Wheels to the elderly in our community, organizing and working at benefits to locally aid those in need, visiting care homes, creating care packages for children for our local hospital, hosting bake sales and toy drives, cleaning up our local park, maintaining the landscaping around our school building, and a myriad of other projects. An area of focus that we wanted to work on was student leadership, so we created the Middle School IMPACT Leadership group that meets regularly and plans activities for our middle school students. As counselor, I teach Digital Citizenship, a Happiness Curriculum, and focus on mindfulness in my classroom guidance lessons. My mantra to kids is encouraging them to become the “best version of themselves.” Yearly themes have reinforced the character initiative. Themes in recent years have included “Be the Reason Someone Smiles Today” as we focused on happiness and “The Power Yet” as we expanded our focus on growth mindset.

Another highly successful program is FAB (Fabulous) Families in which every student and staff member in the school is assigned to a “family.” Students are divided into multiage groups. The adults are the FAB leaders. Our goals in this project are to give each student another adult contact that remains constant throughout his/her years at the school, to develop strong relationships with others in our school community, encourage all children to become mentors, build school pride, self-esteem, leadership skills, and provide character development instruction in small group settings. We currently have 37 participating families in our building. The building leadership team and student-led impact group plan monthly activities with specific themes that promote the goals of the FAB Families. Some of the activities the families have done include making cards that were sent to soldiers, creating character posters that are displayed around school, writing thank you notes to the businesses in our community, in addition to many activities that focus on developing positive relationships among the students and staff in our building such as playing Family Feud with other FAB families, and FAB Family Fun Day in which we do scavenger hunts and play a variety of games with other families.

It was not until the fall of 2015 that we looked closely at Character.org’s11 Principles of Effective Character Education and realized that our character program aligned very closely to the principles. It was then that we took everything we were doing in the realm of character education and plugged it into the principles and found the areas that we still needed to work on which included collecting and analyzing data about the effectiveness of our program. We also worked more diligently at including parents and the community in our program by inviting them to be a part of it. Many of the “Make a Difference” projects that reach out into the community help us achieve this goal. We began to utilize our school website and Facebook page to better inform everyone of the successes we are achieving with character education.

The positive feedback regarding our character initiative from our students, staff, parents, and community has been rewarding. Seventh grade student Anna shared, “Since we’ve started learning about good character, I have seen an improvement in the way students treat each other. You used to see kids playing alone on the playground, but that doesn’t happen much anymore. Students try to make everyone feel included.” Carol Sack, a former classroom teacher and intervention specialist at NCEMS, said, “I think strong character traits have always been a part of the culture in this community, but now that we emphasize and reinforce it at school, it shows the kids that it is important to our community and students are made aware of the traits they possess and work to improve them.” Paraprofessional Deb Schmitz who works with students in a variety of school settings said,

Courtney Carpenter, mother of four students attending NCEMS, said,

Kent Schnackenberg, a local salesman and Type 1 diabetes spokesman who visits the school often, commented,

In 2016, after 4 years of character development implementation, we applied for and were recognized by the Kansas State Department of Education and KSCharacter.org with the Enhanced Spotlight Recognition in Character Development for our work in character education. The following year in 2017, we received recognition for Promising Practices for our “Make a Difference” projects from Character.org. In 2018, we applied for the first time as a Kansas School of Character and were honored to receive that recognition. We were also recognized as a 2018 National School of Character by Character.org last spring which prompted us to send a delegation to the 2018 National Forum on Character held in Washington, DC, to celebrate, share our story, and continue learning new strategies. In 2019 we received recognition for Promising Practices for our “FAB Family Project.”

Character education continues to evolve and grow at NCEMS. Our increased emphasis on socioemotional learning for the 2020-21 school year has allowed us to expand character development in new directions. Our current buildingwide theme focuses on students and staff as “leaders and learners.” A new pledge emphasizing the six pillars with students reciting each morning, “we are trustworthy, we are respectful, we are responsible, we are fair, we are caring, we are good citizens, we are leaders and learners,” and ends with a spirited “we are NC” helps define who we are as a National School of Character.