Making Room for a Changing Community

Over the last few years, Ensign School in Salt Lake City has changed quickly. Enrollment has climbed to nearly 390 students, and with that growth has come far more diversity in race, language, ability, family circumstance, and life experience than the school had known before. What could have become a story of strain has become a story of intentional belonging. Under the leadership of counselor Andrea Sline, the school has leaned into kindness as one of the clearest ways to help a changing student body become a true community. Students are not being asked to erase differences. They are being taught how to make room for one another with more care.

The school’s definition of kindness is grounded and generous: being respectful, caring, thoughtful, empathetic, helpful, and trustworthy without expecting anything in return. When we are kind, we make other people’s days better. Students from every grade helped shape those words, and student leaders worked to synthesize what classmates were saying into a final definition that the school could live by together. That process reflected what Ensign wants to become: a place where many different voices help build one community.

Kindness is being taught directly through lessons and carried into Ensign’s “school families,” mixed-age groups that bring kindergarteners through sixth graders together for service, relationship-building, and shared projects. Teach Kindness lessons such as Asking for Help, STOP!, and The Courage to Be Kind give students language for self-control, support-seeking, and courageous care. Those lessons come alive in school family activities like making Valentine’s cards for hospital patients and talking honestly about what it means to help someone else without expecting anything back.

The school’s winter sock drive also sparked something larger. After collecting socks for a local shelter, students began wondering about families inside their own building who might need support, too. That question led to the creation of a clothing closet, built through donated items and sustained by families who continue to organize and replenish it. In that way, one act of kindness became the beginning of another.

In a school that has had to grow quickly and make room for many new stories, Ensign is showing what it means to do that with tenderness and imagination. Kindness here is not only helping students get along. It is helping a changing school become itself.