Month: November 2021

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Beware social and emotional indoctrination in schools

Social and emotional learning is the latest trend at your child’s school. SEL sounds beneficial, but that’s a disguise. In truth, it indoctrinates kids with extremist ideas many parents don’t condone.

On Nov. 22, the Hartford Courant reported that West Hartford, Conn., elementary school parents are in an uproar. They’re complaining that teachers are putting words such as “nonbinary” on the chalkboard and telling kids, including kindergarteners, they can live life as a gender different from what they were assigned at birth. Parents were told by school authorities that they can’t opt their children out.

Most Americans think parents should have the final say on what children are taught. From Treasure Valley, Idaho, to Greenwich, Conn., school board candidates made SEL an issue in elections earlier this month.

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita encouraged parents to speak up and cautioned that SEL programs shift “the role of teachers from educators to therapists.”

Fighting SEL is an uphill battle because it’s not only favored by the left-leaning educational bureaucracy; it’s also big business. “The SEL ecosystem today is flush with dollars,” reports Tyton Partners, SEL industry consultants.

Billions in federal COVID-relief money for schools is being used to buy SEL programs and fund SEL instructors. Advocates and companies that produce the materials lobby Congress and the federal Department of Education to ensure legislative language precisely matches what they’re selling.

Nationwide, sales of SEL materials shot up 45{e4f787673fbda589a16c4acddca5ba6fa1cbf0bc0eb53f36e5f8309f6ee846cf} in a year and a half to $765 million in 2021, reports Education Week.

But parental opposition is also surging. Attorney General Merrick Garland asked the FBI to look into parents protesting issues like SEL at school board meetings. His son-in-law is a co-founder of Panorama Education, a company raking in millions selling SEL materials to school districts. Conflict of interest?

And what about the billions of dollars the Democrats’ Build Back Better legislation allocates to child care and pre-K? Will that money pay to indoctrinate even younger minds? Likely, “yes.” At least a dozen states, including New York, have already adopted SEL standards for preschool.

As for elementary schools, gender dysphoric kids make up less than 1{e4f787673fbda589a16c4acddca5ba6fa1cbf0bc0eb53f36e5f8309f6ee846cf} of the school population. Protect them, of course, from bullying and discrimination. They need to feel safe. But don’t brainwash the rest with one-sided, repeated lessons about gender issues.

West Hartford is reported to hammer away grade after grade, starting with a kindergarten-level book about a teddy bear who knows in his heart he is a girl teddy, not a boy teddy. Then, a book about Aiden, who knows the sex he was assigned at birth is “wrong.” Then, a book about choosing pronouns. And another about a girl named Jazz, who changes her gender identity. Are kids reading that many books about the U.S. Constitution?

One Arkansas father objected that his fifth grader’s teacher showed a video of a transgender activist’s speech. Then, the teacher, wearing a “Protect Trans Lives” T shirt, invited the class to a pride celebration: “I’ll be at Pride from 1 to 6! I hope to see you there!”

SEL was originally sold as training children to control their emotions, manage their time and make good personal decisions. Teachers have always tried to instill these life skills. They’re the same American values Benjamin Franklin proselytized in his autobiography 200 years ago.

But recently, SEL purveyors, including the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning, have openly revised their goals. CASEL advocates for “transformative SEL” to promote “justice-oriented civic engagement.” Translation: Make your kids into activists.

A South Bend, Ind., school district adopted SEL two years ago to curb substance abuse and bullying. Now, parents, recognizing the radical messaging, are demanding more oversight.

Who’s in charge of what your child learns? Parents need to take control. It’s not an easy fight against the combined forces of educational profiteers and left-wing activists. But the stakes are too high to accept defeat.

Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York and author of “The Next Pandemic.”

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Homeschooling surges among black families

Raegan Mayfield’s 11-year-old son was doing well in his Christian private school, but Mayfield and her husband felt there were gaps in how his history classes addressed racial subjects. They supplemented his education at home, but then COVID-19 concerns and racial issues became front and center in spring 2020. “My husband and I became really protective of our son,” Mayfield said.

The couple, who live in Georgia and work from home, began looking into homeschooling options. “We wanted to keep the Biblically sound education but then also diversify his education a bit,” Mayfield said.

Finding Heritage Homeschoolers, a group for African American homeschoolers in the Atlanta area, gave Mayfield the encouragement she needed. She and her husband began homeschooling their son in fall 2021.

The COVID-19 pandemic drove an increase in homeschooling across all demographics, but the boost was particularly large among African American families. According to Census Bureau data, the percentage of black families educating children at home grew
fivefold in six months, from 3.3 percent in April 2020 to 16.1 percent in October 2020.

Steven Duvall, director of research at the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), said that in previous years African American families homeschooled at about half the rate of white families. But more recent surveys show the black homeschooling rate is only a couple of percentage points behind that of white families. “It just shows you how diversified the homeschool movement has become,” Duvall said.

That shift began even before 2020. According to a 2015 report
by Brian Ray at the National Home Education Research Institute, the number of black homeschooling families “nearly doubled from 1999 to 2012.”

Amber O’Neal Johnston, who helped start the Heritage Homeschoolers group the Mayfields joined, said she has seen more black families involved since she started homeschooling about seven years ago, but the growth has exploded in the past two years. Heritage Homeschoolers opens registration to new families twice a year, in January and August, and in 2019 and early 2020, the group received fewer than 20 applications in each of those months. Since August 2020, though, 34 to 41 new families have applied each month registration is open.

Before starting Heritage Homeschoolers, Johnston and her husband were involved with another homeschool group. They enjoyed it, despite being the only black family there. But their daughter began to say negative things about her own skin and hair and stopped playing with her black dolls. “It’s not like anyone had been mean to her,” Johnston said. “It wasn’t like she had been somewhere where people were saying negative things about black people.”

The Johnstons never left their first homeschooling group, but they decided to look for other black homeschooling families. Soon Heritage Homeschoolers was born, and it kept growing. It now serves 94 families with 280 children.

In March 2020, Khadijah Ali-Coleman defended her doctoral dissertation on perceptions of community college preparedness among dual-enrolled African American homeschooling students. Ali-Coleman homeschooled her daughter for a while and co-founded Black Family Homeschool Educators and Scholars, a research group that provides virtual training for parents. In her research, Ali-Coleman identified several reasons black parents chose to homeschool, including concerns that schools aren’t properly teaching about black history and convictions that parents could better protect their child’s self-esteem at home.

Emily Powell, a representative for National Black Home Educators, said in an email that the organization has “seen incredible growth” this year. According to Powell, many new families are homeschooling due to COVID-19 restrictions, virtual learning situations, or concerns about schools teaching critical race theory.

Jasper and Deah Abbott prayed about their son’s education after his prekindergarten year ended with virtual learning in spring 2020. Deah said that four generations of her family have taught in public schools, but the Abbotts’ concerns about COVID-19 and virtual instruction convinced them to give homeschooling a try. They pulled their son out of public school in fall 2020, the weekend before he would have started kindergarten.

Deah is white and Jasper is black. In some homeschool circles, their son may be the only brown-skinned person. “He feels that—that otherness,” she said.

The family also joined Heritage Homeschoolers. Abbott thinks her son may benefit even more from the group than most children.

Johnston believes the uptick in homeschooling will continue, especially now that there are more support groups and options for single or working parents.

“Parents have had an opportunity to see their children just flourish at home,” she said. “When everyone was forced to bring the kids home, black families, in large numbers, saw how beautiful it was.”

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‘The Exponential Age’ and Online Learning in 2030

The Exponential Age: How Accelerating Technology Is Transforming Business, Politics, and Society by Azeem Azhar

Published in September of 2021.

Living through in-between pandemic times has made it difficult to think about the future of higher ed. Mostly, we are all trying to make it through our days. Planning for the university of 2030 feels like a luxury that we simply can’t afford at the moment.

Why should we be thinking about the higher ed of the future? One lesson that COVID-19 should teach us is that tomorrow’s institutional resilience is a function of today’s institutional investments.

What should we be doing now to build the anti-fragile university of the future?

One place to start thinking about the future of higher ed is to read (and talk about) books about the future. The Exponential Age is an excellent place to start.

The core argument of The Exponential Age is that 21st-century technologies are changing exponentially, while the institutions that structure our society evolve incrementally.

The difference between the speed at which technology progresses and our ability to change how we think and act leads to what the book’s author, entrepreneur Azeem Azhar, calls an “exponential gap.”

The Exponential Age is full of stories of how this gap plays out in areas of AI and computing, biology, renewable energy, and manufacturing.

Little attention is given to the potential impacts of exponential technological change on higher education. This is not a critique of The Exponential Age, but instead an appreciation that Azhar provides us a framework to think about some possible higher education futures.

What will it mean for higher education that by 2030, computer power will be 100 times as fast?

Today, I would judge online education to be at roughly the same state of development as electric vehicles (EV).

An EV has some areas of superiority to a vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine (ICE) and many other areas of comparative deficiency.

EVs are quieter and require less maintenance than an ICE vehicle, and they can be charged at home.

EVs, however, are today more expensive than comparable ICE vehicles, owing to the high costs of batteries. Electric cars also cannot travel as far on a full charge as a gas-powered car can travel on a full tank of gas. Charging an EV battery takes considerably longer than filling a gas tank. And the number of charging stations nationwide pales compared to the over 65,000 places in the US where you can fill up your gas tank.

Like EVs, online education does have some advantages over face-to-face learning. For adult working professionals, online education’s geographic and temporal flexibility makes this medium of learning and credentialing superior to residential alternatives.

For many learners, however, online education lacks many of the elements that make residential learning so impactful and effective. Online learning can make it challenging to structure one’s time effectively for students who are not well prepared to succeed in college.

The social element of learning, including the connection between educators and students, can be more challenging for some learners to achieve in a fully online environment. And today, creating high-quality immersive learning experiences that emphasize educator/learner relationships and active/experiential learning is not any less expensive for colleges and universities to deliver than comparable residential courses.

By 2030, the advantages that ICE vehicles have over battery-powered vehicles will likely have disappeared. Batteries may not get exponentially cheaper and faster, but they will drop in price and increase in capacity. By 2030, EV batteries will likely be a third as expensive and enable vehicles to travel twice as far between charges as today.

Will these changes mean that electric cars and trucks will replace gas-powered vehicles at a faster rate than we might comprehend today? I’d say that is likely.

How might online learning change by 2030?

One possible future is that advances in AI, coupled with a continued rapid scaling of online platforms, could fundamentally alter the economics of online education.

What happens when the integration of artificial intelligence into scaled online educational platforms enables the learning experience to feel entirely social, interactive, and immersive?

One of the points that Azhar makes is that exponential technologies make it harder to predict the future. We can never fully forecast how rapidly changing technologies, business models, and external events might accelerate changes in areas such as work, consumer behavior, and even politics. We are not good at thinking exponentially.

The point, however, is that we utilize a framework of exponential change to help us decide which areas we should invest in research, development, and experimentation.

Colleges and universities, even those fully dedicated to the delivery of a bundled residential learning experience, should carve out some time and space to invest in experimenting with tomorrow’s teaching and learning modalities.

Scaled online learning may never be as intimate, relational, interactive, and immersive as traditional online courses and programs. But it may get better much faster than we think, allowing the costs for teaching and credentialing to fall rapidly.

Investing in experimenting with new scaled online learning methods may also reveal new ways that residential education might be improved.

Reading and talking about The Exponential Age might be a tool to help us at colleges and universities to think beyond our day-to-day challenges and to imagine what higher education might look like in 2030.

What are you reading?

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‘Halo Infinite’ fans are learning that ‘free’ comes with some costs

For some fans, it doesn’t matter that Halo Infinite “lives up to sky-high expectations.” The unlocks simply aren’t coming fast enough.

It’s still early days for Infinite, which technically launches on Dec. 8. But Microsoft and developer 343 Industries surprised fans on Nov. 15 with a surprise release of the new Halo’s competitive multiplayer mode. This PvP side of the game features one significant change for the series in particular: It’s entirely free to play.

The Dec. 8 release is still a $60 game with a story that finds Master Chief, longtime hero of the series, facing off against a new alien threat to humankind’s existence. But Halo is also a favorite among people who enjoy the thrills of competing against other players online, and there’s no up-front cost for that anymore. So now, anyone can play.

That kind of change has a ripple effect, though. The free side of the game still required an investment of time and money from Microsoft, which owns 343. And it’s not a charity. Free-to-play games generate their own kind of income, and the process of turning Halo into something like that means that 343 needed to follow the examples set by other successful games.

Halo Infinite‘s free-to-play pitch starts with a Battle Pass — a concept that should be familiar to fans of games like Fortnite. Just like in Epic’s hit battle royale, Halo’s Battle Pass gives players something to reach for. As they play PvP and level up, they unlock cosmetic items that can be equipped to change the look of their profile and their in-game space marine’s armor.


The free-to-play pitch in ‘Halo Infinite’ starts with a Battle Pass — a concept that should be familiar to fans of games like ‘Fortnite’.

The troubles for 343 start with what’s available Infinite‘s first Battle Pass. Each level only nets you a couple of items — there are 166 awards in total, spread across 100 levels — and much of what you get isn’t terribly exciting. For every cool helmet or visual effect that makes it look like your armor is on fire, there are scores of slightly different color schemes or visually similar armor attachments.

There’s also a free track to the Battle Pass that gets you an even smaller pile of stuff. But the premium track for this first Battle Pass, which costs about $10, doesn’t seem like a great buy just because of how boring the unlocks are. That’s a problem 343 should be thinking about as it looks to the next Battle Pass.

Uninspiring cosmetics are only part of the problem, though. The bigger issue is how much of a drag it is to actually level up that Battle Pass. In Halo Infinite, you only earn experience points (XP) toward the Battle Pass by completing challenges. You can lose every match and rank near the bottom of your team each time, but you’ll still be making regular progress as long as you’re checking off the boxes of your challenges.

At any given moment in Halo Infinite, you’ll have three challenges in your queue (or four if you’ve got the premium Battle Pass). Those challenges are randomly pulled from a pool and they come with requirements like killing a certain number of enemy Spartans (the name for Halo’s space marines) with a specific gun or completing some number of a specific match type.

The reward for completing a challenge rarely climbs higher than 300 XP. So if you’re consistently clearing a challenge or two in every match, you’re earning the 1,000 XP needed for a new level every three or four matches. It’s not quite that smooth in reality, however.

An image from Halo Infinite's PvP mode showing a player at the controls of a Ghost, which is Halo's take on an alien hoverbike, as they shoot at another player in the distance.


Credit: 343 Industries

Halo Infinite jumbles all of its different ways to play into playlists, largely built around two options: A smaller 4v4 playlist and a larger 12v12 “Big Team Battles” playlist. So if you’ve got a challenge calling for a win in the “Control” match type, where opposing teams fight to capture specific points on the map, you’ve got to wait for it to come up in whichever playlist you choose. It’s a similar issue with gun-based challenges: Everyone starts with the same weapons, so if your challenge calls for kills with one of the trickier-to-find firearms, you’re similarly stuck waiting until you track one down.

People don’t necessarily want to wait for random elements to fall in their favor, however. So Halo Infinite‘s challenges have created a situation where you get people who are playing for the XP rather than for the win. They’re dropping out of matches that don’t line up with whatever their current challenge calls for. Or they’re wandering off from their team to hunt down a particular gun, giving the opposing team a numbers advantage in the process.

The recent arrival of Halo Infinite‘s first in-game event highlights some these issues in a profound way. The event, Fracture: Tenrai, gives all players, free and paid, an event-specific track of unlocks to reach for — the highlight of which is Spartan armor with a distinctly samurai look. To get any of the unlocks, you need to complete event-specific challenges in the limited time “Fiesta” playlist.

The problem is, all of the Fracture challenges live in the same pool as standard challenges. So if you have three non-Fracture challenges queued up, you’ll need to clear at least one of them — or use one of the few “challenge swaps” you get from leveling up the free Battle Pass track — to have a chance at receiving a Fiesta-linked challenge. It’s entirely possible to land in a situation where playing the event’s Fiesta mode gives you no chance at actually making progress toward another unlock, ostensibly the reward for event participation.


The recent arrival of the first ‘Halo Infinite’ in-game event highlights some these issues in a profound way.

That’s absolutely bonkers. Events in games with “live” elements, such as Fortnite or Destiny, feel meaningful because they tie limited time activities directly to tangible rewards. Halo Infinite‘s first Fracture event fails on this most basic level because of how uncertain it is that you’ll actually make progress on a given day.

The studio is clearly listening. Already, 343 has acknowledged feedback about Infinite‘s progression issues and added a repeating “Play 1 match” challenge that nets everyone 50 XP for every match completed. It’s not the ideal way to level up; you’d have to play 20 matches to earn 1,000 XP. But it does provide a steady trickle of XP as you play, which wasn’t an option before. Hopefully, the next in-game event will embrace challenges with a similar line of thinking.

The flipside here is that Halo Infinite is remarkably enjoyable. I haven’t had this much fun playing a Halo game online with friends since the Xbox 360 era of releases, going back almost 15 years. It feels as fast and fluid to play as Halo always has, but with major improvements to the overall look as well as rule tweaks and a whole assortment of new firearms that make every match feel more balanced and winnable by either team.

I’ve made my peace with the rockier bits by just ignoring them. The thing about the Battle Pass, and cosmetics as a whole, is it’s entirely optional. If you ignore all that stuff, Halo Infinite is still there. It plays exactly the same, and carries the added bonus of you not having to worry about any of that challenge stuff. Your in-game avatar will looking a bit more boring to other players, but you yourself rarely see it outside of between-match menus.

A text-free menu screen from Halo Infinite's PvP mode showing a version of the unlockable samurai-inspired Spartan armor available from the Fracture: Tenrai in-game event.


Credit: 343 Industries

That’s not a great situation for 343 or Microsoft, of course. But it speaks to the challenges that lie ahead for a creative team that hasn’t ever attempted something like this before. Infinite is Halo’s first brush with free-to-play, and while 343 has plenty of experience building Master Chief adventures, the studio has never bundled that together with the kinds of hooks that make a free-to-play experience really sing.

That’s why I’m not alarmed by any of the issues Halo Infinite is dealing with right now. These are growing pains. Plenty of games come and go quickly because they’re simply not mechanically satisfying to play. That’s not a problem here. This is the best Halo’s been in a very long time, at least from where I’m sitting. That gives 343 an up-front advantage, and one that pairs easily with the name recognition the studio already enjoys as Microsoft’s principal creator of Halo games.

There’s no way of knowing if Halo’s free-to-play experiment will pan out in the long run. This 20-year-old series that’s been largely absent for the past six years is returning now to a game industry that’s been re-shaped by an explosion of high quality free-to-play experiences. It may be that Halo’s DNA simply doesn’t mesh well with the cosmetic unlocks that make the likes of Fortnite so alluring.

At this admittedly early stage of Halo Infinite‘s life, that’s what it feels like to me: Halo, a series that traditionally pitted generically armored red and blue teams against one another, doesn’t immediately feel like a great fit for the free-to-play cosmetics grind. But the team at 343 deserves the benefit of the doubt from fans and newcomers alike as they work to find the approach that works best for Halo in a free-to-play world.

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A Proclamation on National Physical Fitness And Sports Month, 2021

Despite the unprecedented challenges and disruptions of the past year, we continue to see examples of Americans finding innovative ways to stay active and healthy.  Some have moved their workouts into their living rooms or garages.  Others have taken up new sports.  Many have simply rediscovered the satisfaction of a walk through their neighborhood.  Despite this creativity, far too many people struggle to incorporate regular physical activity into their daily lives.  Socioeconomic disparities, lack of opportunities for safe play, and limited access to programs for increased activity are just a few of the inequities that many Americans face — inequities that have been further exacerbated by the pandemic.  During this National Physical Fitness and Sports Month, we encourage all Americans to stay active for their health and wellbeing.  Whether by pursuing a more active lifestyle, making physical activity a priority and an essential part of everyday living, or supporting efforts in local communities that increase access to sports and physical fitness opportunities for all, participating in physical activities leads to a healthier lifestyle.

Physical activity is one of the best tools we have to help combat chronic diseases experienced by over half of all Americans.  Even a single session of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity can boost your mood, sharpen your focus, reduce your stress, and improve your sleep.  More regular physical activity — over months or years — can contribute to a reduced risk of depression, heart disease, several types of cancer, dementia, type 2 diabetes, and obesity.

No matter our age or ability, the more that we can make regular physical activity and participation in sports a part of our lives, the better off both we and our Nation will be.  Greater amounts of physical activity can have positive effects in every stage of life and lead to better overall health outcomes for both children and adults, including those with disabilities.  The Department of Health and Human Services’ Move Your Way campaign provides helpful tips to encourage children and adults to meet the recommendations from the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans.  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Active People, Healthy Nation initiative provides a blueprint for building active communities to make it easier for all Americans to attain the physical activity they need, with a goal of getting 27 million more Americans physically active by 2027. 

By transcending differences and uniting in celebration of physical activity, healthy competition, and shared enjoyment, sports are a fun and engaging way to stay active and keep fit for people of all ages.  For our Nation’s youth, playing sports can also help to build confidence on and off the field, while team sports foster the added virtues of service to common causes and communal responsibility — win or lose, every game offers the opportunity to learn something new or hone your skills.  Every athletic challenge is an avenue to greater mental and physical resilience.  While social distancing has made participation in organized sports challenging, we can use this time to renew our focus on fundamental skills and training in preparation for a return to play, especially for young athletes. 

Our Nation can and must do more to make sure that every child has the opportunity to play sports and obtain the benefits that come with play, including greater physical fitness and better health.  As we recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, it is more important than ever that we ensure equal access to sports and fitness activities for everyone.  To that end, my Administration continues to promote programs that provide opportunities for all of our young people to play sports — regardless of their race, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, disability, or neighborhood — in support of the National Youth Sports Strategy.

I encourage every American to discover an enjoyable exercise activity that fits into their daily routine.  It does not matter how you choose to be active — whether you are trying your hand at a new sport, exploring a local park, or going for a walk or a jog in your own neighborhood, physical activity holds the key to better health and wellness.  During National Physical Fitness and Sports Month, let us all strive to be more active together.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR., President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim May 2021 as National Physical Fitness and Sports Month. I call upon the people of the United States to make daily physical activity a priority, to support efforts to increase access to sports opportunities in their communities, and to pursue physical fitness as an essential part of healthy living.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this thirtieth day of April, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-one, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and forty-fifth.

JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR.

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Stafford Elementary School students complete kindness-based fundraiser

From Stafford County Schools:

Students at Stafford Elementary School (SES) recently completed a two-week, kindness-focused fundraising campaign named Raise Craze.  During the fundraiser, students showed their appreciation to donors by completing Acts of Kindness for others. At the end of the campaign, the students completed more than 630 acts of kindness and raised more than $16,000.

“Students completed a variety of kindness acts, from picking up trash in their community to writing special letters to teachers at Stafford Elementary School. Some students even made blessing bags for the homeless,” said SES Principal Stefanie Sanders. “In addition to individual acts of kindness, the school hosted a community Chalk the Walk at the school to spread kindness messages and art.”

During the campaign, students signed their name on various sea life and applied it to the Dolphin Kindness Wall after completing an act of kindness.  “Kindness is an important part of good citizenship, and we all can learn a lesson from these students about supporting one another with kindness,” said Dr. Stanley B. Jones, SCPS Interim Superintendent. “Every small act leaves a ripple of joy in the community. I encourage all of us to go out and do something nice for someone today. You never know how large an impact one small act, such as a letter of support to a child’s teacher, will make.”

As the culmination of the campaign, school administrators, with the support of the SES PTA, created a surprise Magical Celebration day on Friday, November 19. With support from the SES PTA, each grade level hallway was immersed in a different Disney movie theme. Teachers, administrators, counselors, and staff dressed as characters from the movie, enhancing the magic.  “We wanted a fundraiser that meant something. The kids were so excited to complete their acts of kindness and see how being kind can make a BIG difference,” said Kathleen Meade, Stafford Elementary PTA President.

 

The students also were surprised with two kindness assemblies. The Stafford County Sheriff’s Department provided several displays from the special operations unit which included the SWAT Team, the K9 Unit, and the Unmanned Aircraft Systems Team. Guest speaker Lieutenant Diggs delivered an inspiring message addressing the importance of kindness. Stafford County Fire House 4 conducted the second assembly,  providing a 100-foot fire truck. The students watched as Mrs. Sanders and Mrs. Hardman, the school administrators, were raised into the air above them to read “Be Kind” by Pat Zietlow Miller.

“These two organizations are a large part of our community,” said Sanders. “They have always done kind things for us, so having them deliver a message about kindness was very powerful for our students. We hope our students remember how everything begins with just one small act, and that the message of kindness resonates with them all year.”

 

Photos courtesy Stafford County Schools