March 2018 Message from the Superintendent

The Great Kindness Challenge

A few weeks ago I was pleased to join CUSD Board members, the Carlsbad mayor and council members, and hundreds of students, teachers, and parents in celebrating the 2018 Great Kindness Challenge. With the Excalibur Dancers and CHS Drumline rallying the crowd, we formed a giant human happy face on the Carlsbad High School football field.

Jefferson Elementary School launched the first “Great Kindness Challenge” seven years ago. The school community came together to show how a week of acts of caring and goodwill could improve the school’s relationships and culture. Since that modest inaugural event, the Great Kindness Challenge has exploded into an international movement. In 2018, over ten million students, attending nearly 20,000 schools in over 100 countries, performed 500 million acts of kindness as a part of the Challenge.


The Great Kindness Challenge, a program offered through the nonprofit Kids for Peace, aims to empower students to create a culture of kindness. Kids For Peace CEO and co-founder, Jill McManigal, is a former teacher and a Jefferson parent.


This year, the Great Kindness Challenge featured a “Bus Across America” tour, starting in New York City with an appearance on Good Morning America. The Kindness Bus journey highlighted Kind Coins for Hurricane Relief, a Kids For Peace program that is funding the construction of four new playgrounds in communities impacted by last year’s destructive hurricanes. Kids For Peace has also built schools in Kenya and Pakistan.

                                 

Chad Lund, principal of Jefferson Elementary, believes that the Great Kindness Challenge helps create a positive school climate. “We focus on being kind, and kids simply know it’s how we do things.” All Carlsbad Unified schools participated in Kindness Week with a variety of activities and events. At Calaveras Hills Elementary School, the Coyote Dads group and the PTA took on a school beautification project. They created a beautiful rock garden located on the main campus walkway. Also, each class read and discussed the book Only One You. They learned that we are all special and unique as individuals, but that when we come together we form something strong and beautiful.


Students at Valley Middle School sent “Smile Grams” to their friends. Other students made “Peace Packs” to be distributed to the less fortunate in our community. School clubs assisted with a “Got Kindness?” activity in which students used strips of construction paper to describe acts of kindness that they had observed, and then built a “Chain of Kindness” with them. And ASB students gave out “Kindness Packs” to kids who performed random acts of kindness around campus. 

During Kindness Week, our next generation of leaders is learning that every person can truly make a difference, and that even a small act of kindness here can have an amazing impact throughout the world.

Kindness Matters!