Thursday, November 5, 2009
LITTLE ROCK — Learning good character goes right along with the A, B, Cs and one, two, threes at Vilonia Primary School.
The kindergarten-through-fourth-grade school has several long-standing character-education programs, and its Mapping the Future Career Day program has been given a Promising Practices Award by the Washington, D.C.-based Character Education Partnership. Counselor Marsha Wallace traveled to the nation’s capital last week to accept the award on behalf of Vilonia Primary.
“It’s motivational, like, ‘Hey, we’re doing something right,’” Wallace said. “It makes you want to come back and work even harder.”
Vilonia Primary held its third annual Mapping the Future Career Day in January 2009. The day-long event is for all students, kindergarten through fourth grade, and highlights the importance of good character in the workplace with speakers and presentations. Parents and other members of the community are on hand to talk about how good character is important in their occupations. Students and teachers dress up as historical figures, like Abraham Lincoln and Amelia Earhart, to talk about how they exhibited good character.
Wallace said the school applied for the Promising Practices award in April 2009 and heard back in July. They had to show how the program was helping students and include any indicators of the program’s success.
Wallace said they are constantly re-evaluating all of their character education programs to make sure they are working. However, being recognized by a national organization - that means a lot, Wallace said.
“It confirms what we already knew, and it helps coming from an organization like that,” Wallace said. “They’re research-based. The have educators from across the country and a lot of experience in this area. When they recognize you, it means something, certainly. It also means something when students come up and want to share with us what they’ve done, if they’ve improved on a test or showed good character in some way. That’s a great indicator for us that we’re doing something that’s working.”
During her Wednesday through-Saturday Washington, D.C., trip, Wallace was able to tour the city for the first time, hear character-education speakers and share ideas with teachers and counselors from schools across the nation.
“My main goal [was] to find out what some other schools around the country are doing, seeing where we are with our character-education program and getting ideas to make our program even better - to learn from their mistakes as well as their successes,” Wallace said.
Vilonia Primary has several character-education programs: action of the month, a volunteer-parent program, golden ticket recognition for good character and other awards and more.
Principal Brian Ratliff said students have to learn good character in order to be successful. He wants his students to grow up to give back to their communities.
“The whole idea is that we can have a comprehensive program, that we can integrate everything into classroom life - the academic parts as well as the social and emotional lives of the students - in order to prepare them to be good citizens,” Ratliff said.
The next Mapping the Future Career Day will be in May 2010. In the next few months, there will be a food drive the first two weeks in November and December. Ratliff and Wallace shared their character-education programs at a counselor conference this summer.
They will speak again, specifically about Mapping the Future Career Day, at a state conference in Fort Smith in November.
Ratliff said character education will continue to be important at Vilonia Primary School.
“We are really excited about this,” Ratliff said. “This is a first step. We’d love to be able to eventually become a National School of Character (the Character Education Partnership’s highest honor). I know we’re doing a good job of educating our kids.
"To me, combined with academics, if we can instill good character in our kids, I think that’s the best thing we can do to prepare our 250 kids for good lives as good citizens.”
According to its Web site, www.character.org, the Character Education Partnership is a national advocate for character-education programming in grades K-12.
It is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.
River Valley Ozark, Pages 61 on 11/05/2009