Kindness That Carries Through the Hallways and Beyond

Van Wyck Elementary School in Lancaster, South Carolina, serves more than 875 students, including a growing number of multilingual families – some from Ukraine and Russia – who have arrived in recent years. Counselor Whitney Carter helps lead the school’s kindness work, with a focus on practical skills that reach across language and background. “A smile is free,” Carter tells students. “Body language speaks – that goes a long way.”

Van Wyck defines kindness as creating a caring, friendly, and helpful school climate through actions that benefit others. Students helped shape that language in a way that felt accessible and inviting. The school’s Kindness Captain visited classrooms and invited children to share the words that come to mind when they think about kindness. That activity helped students see kindness not as something distant or formal, but as something they could recognize, describe, and practice together.

The school also teaches kindness in ways that fit naturally into the rhythm of the day. Classroom teachers led Friendship Constitution and Gratitude Muscle, choosing lessons that were easy to adapt across grade levels and manageable within a regular class period. Carter has already seen results in third grade, where she did not need to run her usual conflict-resolution groups this year. “I think that students learned some of those skills through the lessons,” she says, “and now we’re not seeing as many petty referrals.”

Van Wyck had a month-long Kindness Campaign where faculty and staff gave out Kindness Coins to students demonstrating acts of kindness. This initiative provided a tangible and visual representation of our schools’ collective kindness, allowing students to see the measurable impact of their kind actions and words.

Students also put kindness into action beyond the classroom. They wrote more than 800 notes reading “The world is a better place because you’re here” and shared them with a local behavioral health facility and a retirement home. A schoolwide sock drive collected more than 1,700 pairs of new socks, which students helped sort and bag for delivery through the local United Way.   

Looking ahead, Carter is thinking about how to extend the work to adults in the building. “I’d like to see more kindness and positivity among the staff,” she says, “especially this time of year.” She sees that as the next step: making sure the people teaching kindness are also receiving it.