As a community school, we take many important steps to make every student at our school feel valued and cherished. One such step is creating a detailed policy to serve as a guideline for student behavior.
A small three-person committee, made up of an administrator, faculty member, and lay leader, have been hard at work at creating this detailed, intricate, and thorough behavioral statement. There are many directions this policy can take, and when I talk to the committee members who are working on it, I am reassured that we will have a course of action that will embody the LGA mantra of “learning while learning to care.” I want to share with you the first four guiding principles on which this policy is based.
melyShalom (Peace) Students behave in a manner that maintains harmony and harmonious relations throughout the school. We all strive for this basic principle. At LGA, we show our students on a daily basis, in a myriad of places and events, what this means -- whether it is on the playground, when students negotiate play, or in the classroom, when classmates have differing opinions. We teach our students the concept of living, studying, and playing peacefully every day. Students start their day by greeting an administrator, working on the ability to interact in the adult social realm.
cqg Hesed (Kindness) Students are friendly, generous, and considerate of others. Often when prospective families tour our school, they tell us how friendly and warm our students are. This is something our faculty take many planned steps to embody. Our students are taught starting in the Gan the importance of others –- be it through community service, our buddies program, or baking challot on Fridays. They carry the concept of Hesed throughout their career at LGA when they see our community take social action, both locally and globally.
ceak Kavod (Respect) Students show regard for others and for the physical environment of the school. Earlier this year, the entire student body worked with Jonathan Kohrman on a mural that now adorns the side of our building facing the yard. It is beautiful! Students took pride in their work. When our current fourth- and fifth-graders helped come up with the concepts that Jonathan integrated into the design, they wanted to emulate the “learning while learning to care” slogan of LGA. They get what LGA is all about! In first grade, Morah Rana teaches explicitly to her students that everybody has something that they can work on about themselves, and that we must work together as a team. Our first-graders understand what respect means, and you can even sometimes hear students remind one another to be respectful. This policy focuses on this important concept.
zegiha B’tichut (Safety) Students behave to keep everyone in the school free from harm, danger, risk, or injury. This is an important one! If a student doesn’t feel safe in school, then we aren’t doing our job well. The committee will probably spend the most time on this concept. Children are impulsive. While I can appreciate that impulsiveness in many ways, it is also something that I struggle with when working with kids of all ages. We embrace it when children use their energy to think analytically and creatively, and sometimes an impulsive feeling creates really good work. We can all think of times in our own lives when we may have made an impulsive decision that turned out for the best. But impulsive behavior can become problematic when children are playing together, negotiating with one another, or when they aren’t getting what they want at that moment. It is the school’s job to teach children how to handle difficult or tense peer situations effectively. We have great (I daresay amazing) kids at our school who still need to be taught the many ways to interact with one another civilly.
I look forward to sharing with you the last four concepts in my next posting. Have a wonderful vacation.
