Elementary Students to Participate in Kindness Retreats

Kindness Retreats will be held at all of the elementary schools in the Sun Prairie Area School District beginning this week. These special, day-long retreats for students help to build a more caring school community by engaging students in activities that demonstrate the powerful value of kindness and the painful effects of bullying.

The Kindness Retreats are presented by Youth Frontiers, Inc., a Minneapolis-based nonprofit organization. The high-energy session for 4th and/or 5th graders teaches them how to be a hero by treating others with kindness and challenges them to reduce bullying in their school.

Last spring, Westside Elementary held the first Kindness Retreat in the district with its 4th and 5th grade students.  Westside Elementary Principal Rick Mueller said last year’s retreat made a great impression on students. “A year after our first Kindness Retreat, our 5th grade students still remember the Kindness Boomerang concept. It’s the idea that if you send kindness out into the world, then kindness will come back to you.  They also remember the phrase I See I Can be a Hero, which is used to help students remember the acronym (ICI) or Interrupt, Compliment, Invite away. This is a strategy for students to use if they see bullying.  These ideas really stick with them!”

A Rotary International District-Wide Ethics Initiative helped to ensure the retreats were offered at all elementary schools within the school district. Rotary International District 6250 developed a program in which each club in the District provides a program on ethics for the benefit of youth in their community.

One of the seven program options recommended by Rotary International District 6250 was the Kindness Retreat. The Sun Prairie Rotary Club worked with Sun Prairie school officials to provide the Kindness Retreat program as their commitment to the Ethics Initiative.

Sponsorship for the retreats, which totals about $20,000 for all of the elementary schools, has been a community-wide effort. The Sun Prairie Rotary Club initiated sponsorship opportunities for the retreats among their members and local businesses and the response has been outstanding. Each elementary school’s parent group has donated money for the retreat as has the Findorff Fund of the Sun Prairie Education Foundation. In true community spirit, a special offering was made at a joint service of five local churches on New Year’s Day whose members generously contributed toward the effort.

“The school and community commitment to offering these retreats for our students is yet another example of the caring and generosity you find in Sun Prairie,” said District Administrator Tim Culver. “People value their schools and the education of this community’s children.” 

More than 100 volunteers, including community members and high schools students, will spend the day at one more of the schools to act as small group leaders for the retreats. “It is a community effort,” said Dr. Culver. “I’m excited for these community members and high school students to have this experience with our 4th and 5th graders.  It’s something they will all remember.”

The Kindness Retreats have been found to reduce incidents of bullying and improve the way students treat each other.  “Students genuinely want to get along and the retreat gave them tools to help them do so,” said Westside Principal Mueller. “Education is about more that reading and math.  It is also about teaching character. The Kindness Retreat helped us accomplish this goal in a novel way.”

Mueller said his current 5th grade students, who went through the retreat last year, were asking if they could do it again.  “We talked about the upcoming Kindness Retreats at our school’s morning meeting and the 5th graders told the 4th graders how lucky they are to go to the retreat.”   The Kindness Retreats are scheduled from January 9th – February 18th.   More information is available at http://www.youthfrontiers.org.

Special thanks to the Sun Prairie Rotary Club, the Sun Prairie Education Foundation, the SCO Parent Groups at each elementary school, the church members who participated in the special offering for the retreats at the New Year’s Day joint service, and many other individuals and businesses who’ve made donations to the Kindness Retreat effort.  We could not offer these opportunities for students without your support.