At Sangre Ridge Elementary in Stillwater, Oklahoma, the first line of the school creed names a daily expectation: be kinder than necessary. It’s a high bar for a school of 500 students, but it’s one that Sangre Ridge is living up to. In 2025, the school earned the #1 spot on Oklahoma’s elementary school report card. According to Counselor Emily Deason, that success has come in large part due to the culture of kindness that runs throughout the school day.
“That’s the model that we live by,” Deason explained. “Everything can be tied back to our creed. Are you treating your friends kinder than necessary? Are you modeling that expectation?”
These questions aren’t rhetorical. At Sangre Ridge, kindness is intentionally taught, practiced, and reinforced. Through a shared language that begins in Pre-K, students and staff have a common vocabulary anchoring how they treat one another. As students grow older, Deason sees them practicing those skills more naturally and more often.
The school creed comes to life through both structured recognition and everyday moments. For instance, weekly Kindness Awards honor one student per grade level for consistently demonstrating kindness. Schoolwide initiatives like food drives, mindfulness practices, and the annual Great Kindness Challenge Week give students opportunities to celebrate kindness as a community. In quieter moments, students pass along a “kindness duck” to brighten someone else’s day.
Kindness is not just expected of students, but embodied by the adults around them. Another creed reflects that mindset: “It’s not ‘my kids’,” Deason said. “They’re our kids.” Connection is especially important at Sangre Ridge: staff build long-lasting relationships with students, greeting them by name each morning, showing up to extracurricular events, and creating a sense that every child belongs. That sense of connection has tangible results. In one case, a student who had been attending school only half the time had their attendance climb to around 80% after staff consistently checked in and connected them with a mentor from Big Brothers Big Sisters. For that student and for the broader Sangre Ridge community, kindness is both highly visible in bright, colorful posters and schoolwide celebrations, and present in the smallest, everyday moments, helping make school a place they want to be.
Increasingly, the work at Sangre Ridge goes beyond their individual school. Deason is quick to point out that this work is deeply collaborative, not just between classrooms, but across Stillwater Public Schools’ six elementary schools, where counselors and staff regularly share Teach Kindness lessons. Her hope is that Sangre Ridge’s recognition as a Kind School can serve as a starting point for something larger: a “Kind District,” where a commitment to kindness extends across every school.
In a place like Stillwater, this vision feels well within reach. Sangre Ridge is not only high-achieving in its own right, but also sits at the center of a district gaining increasing state-level attention. In early 2026, both Oklahoma Secretary of Education Dan Hamlin and U.S. Department of Education Assistant Secretary Kirsten Baesler visited Stillwater, recognizing the district’s impressive work. Sangre Ridge isn’t just modeling what a kind school can look like, it’s helping lay the foundation for what a kind district could become.