A School Where Students Learn to Speak With Care
Mary G. Porter Traditional School in Woodbridge, Virginia, serves about 685 students in first through eighth grade. It is a public specialty school in Prince William County where families apply to enroll, parents commit to volunteer hours, and siblings get priority so families can stay together. Many families remain at Porter for years, and that sense of continuity shapes the school’s kindness work. As counselor Laura Meres, who has been at the school for seven years, puts it: “It’s not my kid, your kid—it’s our kid.”
When students spend seven or eight years with the same classmates, friendships deepen, but so can conflict. The focus at Porter is to give students specific, practiced skills for the situations they are actually in. In first grade, that looks like class circles with a talking stick, reading books about how to keep friends, and role-playing what to say when someone falls down. In middle school, it looks like lessons on digital citizenship, conflict resolution, and how to show empathy.
Meres describes one middle school student who struggled to put himself in anyone else’s shoes. During a counseling session, she read him a scenario about a dog passing away. He stopped her; he could not do it. She asked why. “Because it’s a dog, and I feel really bad,” he said. “Well,” Meres told him, “that’s empathy.” She says that light-bulb moment, when a student realizes they already have the capacity for care, is one of the clearest signs the work is landing.
The school is also deeply multicultural. Meres says the hallways are lined with flags from every country students’ families come from. The principal has told families, “If you don’t see your flag, let me know, and we will purchase it and get it hung up.” That visible commitment to belonging runs alongside the kindness work.
Porter’s definition of kindness is direct: kindness means making the school a place where everyone feels like they belong and has the support to succeed. Meres sees the designation as a starting point, not a finish line. “What else can we do?” she says. “We’re always looking for ways to do more.”