Can a Kindness Campaign Truly Change Your School?
Yes, a school kindness campaign can measurably change culture: office referrals fell from 418 to 192 in one year after we shifted our daily focus from discipline referrals to public recognition of kindness, a drop of roughly 54%, without making new rules or consequences the focus of the campaign.
After years of digging through discipline data (who got referred, when, and why), we realized we were spending all our energy on a handful of struggling students and none on the rest of the school doing the right thing every day. So we flipped it. Here's what happened when we built a full year of programming around noticing kindness instead, and what the numbers looked like a year later.
This is part of our Bully Prevention Guide, which covers the strategies that actually moved the needle in our building.
Why We Stopped Chasing Every Referral
In years past, we spent hours sifting through discipline referrals: what kind of behavior was occurring most, where it was occurring, at what time of day, and which students kept showing up in the data. We used that to build behavior intervention plans for our top referral-getting students, move staff coverage to high-referral areas, and write new rules for playground equipment, hallway transitions, and even how kids sat in the lunchroom.
All of that has a place. But we were spending most of our time on the negative, on the small number of students causing the most disruption, while the majority of students quietly doing the right thing got no attention at all. A school kindness campaign flips that ratio.
Starting the Kindness Tree
We started with a Kindness Tree: a bare brown tree on a bulletin board, visible to every student in the building. When a student or staff member witnessed an act of kindness, they recorded it with three pieces of information: who to celebrate, what they saw, and who reported it.
Here is a picture of our Kindness Tree at the start of the school year in September 2015, right after our initial kickoff.
Each morning, we read the latest acts of kindness over the PA system. Kids loved hearing their own names and recognizing their classmates just as much. Giving students the power to acknowledge one another led them to look for kindness all day long: in classrooms, hallways, at recess, and at school events.
Building It Into a Full-Year Program
From there, we expanded past kindness alone. We had students look for other traits that build a positive culture: respect, empathy, friendship, change, growth, differences, and heroism. Our school uses the Olweus anti-bullying program, and we built our own monthly classroom activities around it: September and October focused on Kindness, November on Change, December on being a defender, January on making a positive change, February on being a friend, March on making a difference, April on positive growth, and May on hidden heroes.
Hidden Heroes
In May, students and staff went looking for hidden heroes in our building, adults or students. We taught the definition of a hero first, then asked them to find one among us and write it down, just as they'd been logging acts of kindness all year. We read those stories over the PA the same way, and some of them brought staff members to tears.
Some variations we made to this Act of Kindness program included having kids identify other character traits we know are powerful for building a positive culture.
What the Numbers Actually Showed
At the end of April 2015, before we started this program, our school had 418 discipline referrals school-wide. By the end of April 2016, one year into the kindness campaign, that number was down to 192, a real shift for a school of 420 students. We can't credit this strategy for everything, but it was a major part of the culture change.
A school kindness campaign isn't the only structured approach to reducing referrals and building culture. Other structured approaches, including PBIS and kindness-focused initiatives, also aim to strengthen school climate; PBIS in particular has research linking implementation to reductions in discipline referrals. What made ours work was that it ran every single day, not just for a themed week.
More Bullying Prevention Reading
- 3 Types of Bullying in School + 1 Immense Social Challenge
- 5 Reasons Why Schools Have a Difficult Time Stopping Bully Behaviors
- 5 Reasons Why We Need to Define Bully Behavior and Stop Generalizing Events as "Bullying"
- 6+ Steps to Addressing Bullying When It Occurs
- 9 Strategies We Can Teach Students to Problem Solve
- 7 Ways How to Raise a Defender of Bully Prevention
- Provocative Victims and 7+ Practices for Victory
- One School Wide Philosophy: High-Trusting Relationships
- 13 Ideas to Combat Bullying at the Community Level
- 6 of the Most Hideous Cyber Bullying Tactics Used By Students
- 11 Communication Strategies to Combat Bullying
- 20 Ideas To Successfully Use Bully Data
- 5 Reasons Why Strong Instruction Affects Bully Prevention
- #1 Instructional Lesson for All Students on Bully Prevention
- Power of Buddy Classrooms: 19 Ideas
- 8 Ways to Teach Empathy
- 10 Ways to Empower Defenders
- 9 Reasons Culture Trumps Strategy
- One School Wide Strategy: Kindness Campaign (Currently here)
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a school kindness campaign?
A school kindness campaign is a structured, school-wide effort to recognize and reinforce positive behavior instead of only responding to negative behavior. Ours centered on a visible Kindness Tree, daily PA recognition, and monthly character themes tied to our Olweus anti-bullying program.
How do you start a kindness campaign at your school?
Start small and visible. Pick one bulletin board, one simple way for students and staff to log what they see, and one consistent moment each day, like a morning announcement, to read those entries aloud. Add themes or expand to other character traits once the first habit sticks.
Does a kindness campaign actually reduce discipline referrals?
In our building, office referrals fell from 418 to 192 over one school year after we launched the program, though the before-and-after numbers alone don't prove that this strategy caused the entire drop. Other structured approaches, including PBIS and kindness-focused initiatives, also aim to strengthen school climate, and PBIS in particular has research linking implementation to reductions in discipline referrals.
How long does it take to see results?
In our case, comparing data across a full school year, April 2015 to April 2016, gave us a more useful year-over-year measure than looking at any single semester.
Do you need a formal program like Olweus to run a kindness campaign?
You do not necessarily need Olweus to try a standalone kindness campaign; a Kindness Tree and daily PA recognition are simple places to start. We layered ours onto our existing Olweus anti-bullying program because we already had monthly themes in place, and the monthly sequence we describe here is our own way of building activities around that program, not part of its official curriculum.
- Referrals fell by more than half - from 418 to 192 school-wide, comparing the end of April 2015 to the end of April 2016.
- The mechanism was recognition-first - a Kindness Tree and daily PA shoutouts, without making new rules or consequences the focus of the campaign.
- It scaled beyond kindness - monthly themes (change, friendship, growth, hidden heroes) built around the Olweus anti-bullying program kept it going all year.
- It's one of several structured approaches - PBIS in particular has research linking implementation to reductions in discipline referrals, and kindness-focused programs share the same general aim.
Building a program like this often comes down as much to leadership training as to the campaign itself. The programs listed on this page include options in school counseling and educational leadership, several of which you can start alongside a full teaching or administrative role.
As a 5th grade teacher, in 2010 Jon won the Presidential Award for Elementary Math and Science Teaching (PAEMST). As a principal, his school won the 2012 Blue Ribbon Award. In 2018, he won the National Distinguished Principal Award (NDP). In 2019 he won the National No Kid Hungry Breakfast Hero Award.
Jon is the author of three guides published on teacher.org: An Educator's Guide to Combat Bullying & Bully Prevention; Teacher Evaluation: A Transition Guide to Exemplary Performance; and You are the Wild Card: Infusing Fun Back into Curriculum. He has authored a children's picture book that was released January 2019 titled Benjamin’s Visit to Principal Reads Office…again! (available at www.archwaypublishing.com)
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