Students at Fort Worth, Texas’ Our Lady of Victory Catholic School are more than classmates. They’re family.

A “Faith Family” project launched by principal Samantha Weakland last school year is drawing students together across grade levels, and it’s creating a stronger community by encouraging bonds that extend beyond the typical circle of family and friends.

Weakland told the Centre Daily Times she came up with the idea to group students—two from each of grade at the K-8 school—into Faith Families during a conversation with a family last year, and it’s working wonders to bolster Our Lady of Victory’s mission to educate the whole student.

Students remain with their Faith Families throughout their time at the school, with older students helping to mentor youngsters, she said.

“This builds community across all grade levels and further increases the family atmosphere. Students get to know each other beyond their grade, and interact and learn from them,” Weakland said. “Often times, younger students need a little more support or guidance; a middle school student from their Faith Family may be asked to talk to them. Hearing from an older student makes a big impact.”

The Faith Families meet once a month for team building, prayer services, service work, and athletic events, according to the news site.

Kristy Urgo, parent of an OLV kindergartener, is a big fan of the program.

“My son Ty loves being with the older kids,” she said. “They make him feel so special and treat him so well.”

Kindergarten teacher Jessica Hauser agreed that “having (older) students around the school that they know makes them feel more comfortable and happy (at school).”

“My children all love Faith Families,” Kelly Kurpeikis, mother of four OLV students, told the Centre Daily. “It is a wonderful thing to have a cross-section of ages working together and building relationships throughout their time at OLV.”

Those relationships, Weakland said, are critical to creating a connected community at OLV, and to help students to build strong character virtues they’ll need in life once they leave.

“A positive school climate is essential to the success of a school,” she said. “When all stakeholders feel connected and part of a family then great things can happen.

“At OLV, we want the students to know that they are unique and special and that they should work together to make our classes, our school, our community, and our world a better place,” Weakland said.

In his book The Death of Character, James Davison Hunter, founder of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, points out that communities with a shared source of authority and strong rituals are fundamental for developing character.

“Mortality is always situated—historically situated within distinct communities, and culturally situated within particular structures of moral reasoning and practice,” Hunter wrote. “Character is similarly situated.”

“It develops in relation to moral convictions defined by specific moral, philosophical, or religious truths. Far from being free-floating abstractions, these traditions of moral reasoning are fixed in social habit and routine within social groups and communities,” he continued. “Grounded in this way, ethical ideals carry moral authority. Thus, it is the concrete circumstances situating moral understanding that finally animate character and make it resilient.”

Some religious schools have strong moral convictions, but weak rituals or fragmented communities. The Faith Family program provides a compelling example of a social habit that forms convictions and character by repeated practice—in both older and younger students.

The National Mentoring Resource Center offers insight on peer mentoring for educators interested in building the same kind of formative culture in play at OLV.