A Kinder Way to Respond
Counselor Kimberly Bridwell has spent 24 years working in the schools around Greensboro, Georgia. Now at Anita White Carson Middle School, the students she works with are, in some cases, the children of students she once counseled. “I can just pick up the phone and discuss positive things as well as areas of concern. “They pretty much trust me to know that if I’m calling, it’s something important.”
That trust matters because Bridwell’s work at Carson often involves conversations where students need to hear something honest. The school serves about 330 students in a rural community, and much of the day-to-day kindness work comes down to helping students slow down before a comment becomes a conflict. One way she does this is by teaching students to confront their assumptions. Bridwell tells the story of a student who came to her concerned about a classmate whose Crocs looked worn out. The student wanted to help, maybe get him some new shoes. Bridwell talked to the Croc-wearing student in her office. It turned out the shoes were his favorite pair. He had plenty of others at home. The concern was well-meaning, but the assumption was wrong. Bridwell used the moment to teach students that looking at someone and drawing a conclusion isn’t the same as understanding their situation. “Not everything is what it seems,” she tells them.
The lessons extend to how students communicate on screens. Every student at Carson has a Chromebook, and through digital citizenship lessons, Ms. Melissa Brown, computer science teacher, makes sure students learn to think about tone, word choice, and how a message might land differently than they intended. They talk about what all-caps signals, why a joke that works out loud can read as cruelty in writing, and what it means to remember that there’s a real person on the other side. “Even though you’re behind that computer screen, that person does have feelings.”
The school’s definition of kindness is plainspoken and embedded in their PBIS ROAR Statements – helping each other by respecting boundaries, being nice, and not mean. Since the school began focusing on these skills, discipline referrals for classroom disruptions have gone down from the previous year. Mrs. Bridwell has noticed a change in how students speak up. “Kids who normally don’t really have a lot to say, they’ve been a lot more vocal,” she says. “If someone is not being kind, they let someone know.” Students are learning to advocate for themselves and for each other, which, at Anita White Carson Middle School, might be the clearest sign that the work is taking hold.