With a student’s blunt honesty, Random Acts of Kindness Week at Hunting Hills High School was born.
First year leadership teachers Jonathan Davies and Stephanie Archer have done some smaller things this school year, aiming to promote a sense of school community through “being kind to each other.”
“One of our students asked ‘why do we have to be so creative? Why don’t we just promote this idea of kindness,’” said Davies. “And we thought that was a great idea.”
Thus the week of random acts of kindness came to the school. It started on Monday with every student in the school getting Post-it notes on their lockers on Monday morning that had a compliment on it
“Some kids took it off their locker and gave it to their teachers or passed it along to the other students,” said Davies. “It was a neat idea that the kids could do whatever they want with it, they passed it along or wrote something extra on it.”
National Random Acts of Kindness is observed on Feb. 17, which happened to occur during Hunting Hills’ winter break. A week in March fit better with the school’s schedule.
“We aim to promote this idea of kindness,” said Davies. “We encouraged our leadership students to go out and pursue little things throughout the day, like holding doors open or saying ‘good morning.’”
Other planned activities during the week include giving out cupcakes to random students, giveaways and high-fives from the school’s mascot Stryker.
“It started with us asking if we needed to do something big and creative, or something simple and let students know what our purpose is,” said Davies.
“Hopefully we’ll get more buy-in from the school community. This is such a longterm goal.”