Schools

Spreading kindness, one act at a time

John G. Dinkelmeyer students accept challenge

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Tasked with performing 2,000 acts of kindness in one week, students at John G. Dinkelmeyer Elementary School went above and beyond by performing 5,060, in hope of combatting negativity in the school and the larger community.

“At this point, there are a lot of kids that get bullied and I feel like when we did the kindness challenge, everyone felt good and everyone was in a good mood, and everyone was getting compliments and everyone was feeling better, because everyone was being nice,” said Nicolette Babsin, a sixth-grader.

Each student in the sixth grade had 23 Post-It notes on their desk from Dec. 14 to Dec. 21, and the other students wrote nice things on these Post-Its. At the end of the week, each sixth grader received a poster with their name and all of the Post-Its about them displayed on it.

The sixth graders also helped others outside the school. As a class, they decided to host a pajama drive for Jake’s Jammies, a project of the Ashley Wade Foundation, that provides new pairs of pajamas for children with chronic illnesses.

The project was created in memory of Jake Matthew Staniszewski, who was 2 years old when he lost his battle with a rare cancer called Alveolar Rhabdomyosarcoma, which affects cardiac muscles that usually develop into skeletal muscles.

“It made him feel better when he could stay in his pajamas instead of something the hospital gave him,” said Lily Yepez, a sixth-grader at Dinkelmeyer.

With contributions from teachers, faculty and students, the sixth grade class collected 97 pairs of pajamas for children with chronic illness throughout New York.

Other Dinkelmeyer students helped parents and peers in their immediate community. Xavier Sutherland, for example, swept his house and cleaned the counter to help his mother who works long hours at New York Life.

“I don’t want her to be busy because she works like 9 a.m. in the morning to like 10 p.m. at night,” said Sutherland.

Members of the Dinkelmeyer community emphasized kindness—for example, a group of parents buy presents during the holiday season for school families that cannot afford presents. But last May, Ivy Sherman, the principal of Robert Seaman Elementary School in Jericho, contacted Faith Skelos, the principal of Dinkelmeyer Elementary School, with a proposition: an email containing a video of Sherman and her students asking Dinkelmeyer to accept the Great Kindness Challenge.

“I loved the video that they sent us and I immediately started thinking, ‘Okay, how can I create something equally fun and exciting and pass it on to the next school district?’” said Skelos.

With the aid of the school’s Shared Decision Making Committee, a state mandated group of teachers and parents who seek “to improve the educational performance in the school,” Skelos was able to create fliers and a list of acts of kindness that would work for the challenge. Skelos, though, did not want the kindness challenge to end after one week.

“I think the one-week time frame helped us bring attention to acts of kindness and opened up a dialogue between children and their parents, parents and teachers, teachers and teachers — it opened up that dialogue to so many people,” she said. “So, the one week served to do that, but now I’d like to see that continue.”

The challenge will continue to spread in the spring when Dinkelmeyer’s students challenge three other elementary schools to perform 2,000 acts of kindness in one week.