Character Counts (07-27-09)

This week I had the honor of again working with high school students. I met with the FCCLA officers to describe a new character education program and to ask for their help. The program is called “Character Counts” and the district has decided to adopt it across the entire K-12 learning community.

What does that mean? Well, for me it meant meetings, and lots of them. The discussion began early last spring in our steering committee meeting when we examined our character education needs.

The steering committee agreed that we needed a common K-12 program to provide the teachers and staff a common vocabulary to use when addressing students about character. We wanted to become more consistent in the message we got across and more united in our approach.

So we assembled a district leadership team with representatives for every part of school life. Teachers, paras, secretaries, custodians, transportation and administration were all represented. From that meeting, we agreed upon some central things about Character Counts.

First, we wanted to communicate clearly that Character Counts was not an “add-on” but more of a “weave”, meaning that this program was not going to be something that we expected teachers to expressly teach and students to expressly learn. It is not a one year “sit and get” type of thing. We agreed that the “pillars” of the program needed to be emphasized throughout the year so that it would not just be a bunch of colorful posters in the classrooms.

Perhaps the most important decision of the leadership team was to have students talk with other students about good character.

This led to my meeting with the officers of FCCLA. After many discussions with the staff, we determined that both FCCLA and FFA would both be excellent student groups to “kick-off” and introduce the program to the students.

So I explained the program to the kids. It is actually quite simple. Character Counts consists of six pillars: Trustworthiness, Respect, Responsibility, Fairness, Caring, and Citizenship. If you take the first letter of each pillar, it spells out TRRFCC, which can be pronounced TERRIFIC!

I emphasized to the students that it wasn’t essential for them to memorize these six pillars. There will be ample posters and banners in every room, every hallway, and every bus listing the pillars. Rather, we need these student leaders to explain some basic principles about this program.

First, we are going to emphasize each of the pillars throughout the year. We will focus on Trustworthiness in August and September, Respect in October, Responsibility in November and December, Fairness in January, Caring in February and March, and Citizenship in April and May. One way that we will emphasize these pillars during their allotted time is to have high school students talk with grade school students about the pillar and how it relates to what they are doing at that time of year.

Thus, members of the football team will talk with grade school kids about how important it is Trust their teammates. Members of the basketball team will talk about Fairness. The Communities that Care kids can talk about the importance of Citizenship.

So throughout the year, older students will talk with younger students about what it means to have a pillar of good character. And with any luck, we will be able to keep this going year after year, so that by the time my daughter, who will be a kindergartner next year, graduates from Hill City High School, she will not only know the pillars backwards and forwards, she will practice the pillars as part of who she is.

Character education doesn’t happen overnight. I am excited about how we have decided to approach Character Counts, and I can’t wait to see what our wonderful high school students leaders have to say about character as they kick-off the program and as they visit the grade school throughout the year.