By Emma Tanner etanner@dailycorinthian.com
To the Alcorn School District, students need to feel loved in order to be ready to learn. To help students feel comfortable, they have begun implementing two initiatives for students.
Capturing Kids’ Hearts is a program designed for students ranging from pre-kindergarten to 12th grade. It is a character education based program that aims to teach leadership skills through emotional learning.
“While it talks about capturing kids’ hearts, the program doesn’t start with the kids,” said Elizabeth White, communications director of Alcorn School District. “It starts with the staff and the school personnel. It’s not what we do with the kids, it’s how we do it.”
The main basis of Capturing Kids’ Hearts is relationship building. Through building understanding and empathetic relationships with peers and teachers, students can better face conflicts. It aims to build a supportive culture for students, staff and the community alike.
About 90 percent of ASD staff have received training from Capturing Kids’ Hearts’ instructors. Staff relearn the expectations yearly through a training program called Heart of ASD. Through the CKH and Heart of ASD programs, the district has set four “culture setting non-negotiables.”
The first of these non-negotiables is the establishment of social contracts. A social contract is a classroom agreement where students lay out how they want to be treated, how they want others to be treated and how they want their instructor to be treated. Then, the students collaborate to lay out the expectations and rules of their social contract.
Another non-negotiable is Greetings. Staff are expected to greet students in the classroom doorway before class sessions. The main goal is for staff to take a moment to give each student individual attention to let students know they are seen and valued.
The third non-negotiable is called Good Things. Good Things is a practice done at the beginning of class where students take the opportunity to share something positive that happened to them. White sees it as an opportunity for students to celebrate each other and feel celebrated in return.
The fourth non-negotiable is Launch. A launch is simply the way teachers want students to feel when leaving the classroom. Some teachers have implemented classroom mantras, daily quotes or telling a joke, among other things. The main goal is to leave students feeling positively about their experience in a classroom.
“In doing all of these things, we’ve seen the positive cultures inside each of the school buildings,” White said. “These positive cultures are growing, and the kids are feeling more at home, more involved and more emotionally safe.”
For children pre-kindergarten through sixth grade, they are given a character trait to focus on each month. January’s trait is respect, and students are taught what respect is and how to implement it in their own lives.
Students seventh through twelfth grade have a similar program called 2Words. Through that program, students are given the opportunity to watch a video and meet with school administration to discuss the topic.
For both programs, families are also given the opportunity to receive monthly newsletters to further learn about the topics.
The Alcorn School District is keeping the community updated on CKH and 2Words through their Facebook page.