Walking the dog in our neighborhood this morning, we noticed more people on the streets thanusual. It took a minute for us to figure out why that was. First, we encountered a lively 4- or 5-
year-old girl in a bright red dress skipping ahead of her backpack wearing older brother and
sister. As we stopped to watch from across the street, we witnessed her over-enthusiastic
energy land her sprawled out face down on the pavement. Her tears, most likely due to
embarrassment clearly needed some comforting hugs which she got from her siblings. As we
turned the corner we saw a mother, followed by two meticulously dressed elementary school
age children who smiled up at us somewhat shyly when we wished them “Good luck today.” I
remind my husband, this is a big milestone for everyone, one that often seems to come too
soon, marking the beginning of the end of summer.
Turning towards home, we notice a crowd gathering in the central park square of our development. Small children with big backpacks, somewhat out of control dogs scampering about, and parents, possibly grandparents too, clustering in small conversational groups. The excitement is palatable, even from 15 feet away. The school bus will arrive soon, and ready or not you teachers and school personnel, here begins the new school year.
I pick up The Wall Street Journal from our doorstep, and once in the kitchen spread it open to the World Watch Column on the back page. I’m drawn to a large color photo of a classroom in the Philippines with a descriptive paragraph that explains that yesterday they began holding in person classes for the first time in two years. I note the figure of a small boy in the corner of the frame. He’s outside the classroom, crumped to the ground leaning against the outside wall, his hands covering his most likely tear-stained face. So, this milestone is exciting around the globe, but also not without its fear, worry, and sorrow.
Having been a mother and a grandmother seeing her children/grandchildren off to school on that first day I know that for many, your child’s whole life flashes before you. “It seems like just yesterday…”I was pregnant,” or “we brought you home from the hospital,” or “you were learning to walk.” For parents of older children, so much has happened in our world since they were last in school, I’m imagining it is taking quite an effort to wave good-bye to them this morning at the school bus stop.
It’s not such a new thing to be worried about your children when you send them off to school. A half a century ago, when my children were in the 3rd and 1st grades, attending our neighborhood school in Detroit, someone set fire to the waste baskets in the lavatories and the school had to be evacuated. It was winter and 8-year-old Corinne couldn’t stop talking about how they had to go outside without their coats on when they were “evacuated.” My Aunt Dote couldn’t stop talking about how awful it was that her niece had to learn the word “evacuated” at such a young age and be so frightened by a fire, that according to Corinne, had “melted the chairs in the music room.”
My aunt is no longer around to give her opinion about the current situation, but I’ll state mine, with certainty that it can stand for hers as well. After the recent Uvalde Texas school shooting and learning of the tragedy and traumatic grief of parents and children in that community, it’s awful for parents and children all over our country in this happy season to have to calculate the potential exposure to such extreme danger as they begin the school year.
We can’t forget that many children may be grieving as well. The youngest among them, like the little boy in the newspaper image, might be fighting back some tears while taking this big step away from the security of home and family. Older children may have trepidations, having experienced lots of disarray during periods of school closures, and learning from home, lots of interruptions in sports and school schedules. Many have fallen behind on their achievement scores, while most everyone is somewhat unsure of what to expect in this coming year. Not sure they can spell “unprecedented” but they’re living it.
And a word about the teachers – Six hundred thousand teachers in the US have left the classroom in the last two years, many due to feelings of being under siege, caught in the fallout from Covid policies and the racial and political divisiveness of our current culture. Now school districts have a shortage of experienced teachers, and new teachers like my grandson Ethan that are taking their spots, may lack the support and encouragement needed to do their jobs. For all involved, right behind the need for safety, perhaps as a part of it, is the need for kindness.
For sure, children, teachers, administrators, and parents will slip and fall, like the little girl in the red dress, sometimes even due to their over-enthusiastic energy. As I thought about this, I remembered coming across a non-profit that began in 2002, when a mother, Jeannette
Mare’s three-year-old son Ben died. In the months following his death Jeannette and her friends and family began making ceramic wind chimes in her backyard studio. This kindness being shown to her in her grief gave her the idea of using the bells as reminders of the impact of intentional acts of kindness. By the first anniversary of Ben’s death the group had made and randomly distributed four hundred bells in Tucson Arizona. People who found the bells, these symbols of how kindness can heal, share their stories of grief and loss and the kindness shown to them.
A school-based program, Kind Campus, demonstrates that intentional kindness shows statistically significant associations between social-emotional skills in kindergarten and key outcomes for young adults later. Ben’s Bells and their free kindness education programming have now reached 1.6 million students.
