Wellington Schools kick off another year in 'Kindland'

WELLINGTON — Wellington Schools staff and students will spend another year in "Kindland." Ahead of the 2023-24 school year Values in Action President/CEO Stuart Muszynski spoke to Wellington School staff about the nonprofit's Kindland initiative, an ongoing campaign to promote positivity in the community. The program provides seven lesson plans for teachers, Muszynski said, giving staff a "common language" to help students learn how to get along and make social-emotional learning and behavior management easier. "In pushing kindness, you're teaching students how to get along," he said. "You're teaching the common language for our society of getting along." He referenced when Cleveland's John Adams High School joined "Kindland" in 2017, its suspension and bullying incidents plummeted and graduation rates improved. He also noted a 2017 Coca-Cola study that found employees who practiced one act of kindness a day had more energy and were more engaged. An Ohio State University study released in January found that acts of kindness helped depression and anxiety, he said. "That kindness will grow organically because that's what kindness does," he said. "It's infectious … We all know that when we see an act of kindness, we want to do an act of kindness. When we do an act of kindness … we get an endorphin boost, we get actually a chemical reaction in our brains and we want to do more." He compared the school district to a pinecone, with individual classrooms as the scales and kindness at its core, noting without that strong core, the pinecone falls apart. After speaking to staff, Muszynski said part of the idea is "we can no longer separate the air between schools, community, government, families and business." Each element affects the other," he said. "So that if the air is infected in one sector of our society, then it's going to impact the other sectors. So we needed that common denominator that everybody could be talking about and doing positive actions with, and that's kindness. That's why we're pushing that, as the idea of creating a 'Kindland' wherever you are." Nationally there are 4,500 schools participating in the Kindland initiative, and Muszynski believes those simple acts of kindness "will unite our country again." In 2022, the initiative recorded more than 61 million acts of kindness in Northeast Ohio, he said, from food drives to helping refugee families. Also at Monday's event, Wellington Schools announced senior Nadia Greer, 17, as the winner of a Kindland creative writing challenge. Greer is one of five students from around the country to win the essay challenge, which answered the prompt "How I would make the world a kinder place." Greer said she wrote about why there is no Kindland and how she decided to bring kindness back to Wellington Schools by helping two girls who were being bullied. She will be a Kindland Ambassador this school year. Contact Carissa Woytach at (440) 329-7245 or cwoytach@chroniclet.com.