character

This teen is spending time in the gym rather than jail, thanks to this cop

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Skokie police officer Mario Valenti is changing the perception of police in his community with a little compassion, and $150.

Valenti was recently called to X-Sport Fitness in Skokie, Ill., over a teen who was repeatedly sneaking into the facility without a membership, but instead of arresting 15-year-old Vincent Gonzales on trespassing charges, he opted instead to buy the boy a $150 short-term membership, the Chicago Tribune reports.

“I thought I was going to be arrested at the time,” said Gonzales, who continued to visit the facility to play basketball with his friends long after his mother’s membership expired. “I was very surprised. I want to say thank you.”

Gonzales, a sophomore at Uplift Community High School in Chicago, told the Tribune he was repeatedly busted sneaking in over several months before officials called the police. Valenti’s response, he said, was unexpected.

“It changes how I view police a lot, actually,” Gonzales said. “Now, I know there are some bad cops and some good. There’s a mixture. I used to think all cops were bad.”

His mother, Cynthia Jones, told the Tribune she was equally shocked by Valenti’s generosity.

“Oh my God, I was so surprised, so grateful, it brought tears to my eyes, that someone—a stranger—actually did something like that,” Jones said.

“I’ve had bad experiences with the police in the past—my family and people that I know,” she said. “You just never know. You have to judge somebody for that whey do and not put them in a group of people. Yeah, there are good people out there.”

Valenti said when he realized Gonzales was a “good kid” who simply wanted to play basketball, buying the boy a membership just seemed like “it was the right thing to do.”

“Honestly, I’ve been dealing with kids for over 20 years, and the worst thing for a teenager is idle time,” he said. “Obviously, he was drawn to this club, and he wanted to play basketball there, his friends were there. Having him on the street versus having him in the basketball court at X-Sport, it just seemed like the best thing to do. If it meant dip into my pocket for a little bit of money, you know, it was just the right thing to do.”

Valenti said the response from the public and the media has been “overwhelming.”

X-Sport ultimately chipped in to offer Gonzalez a full two-year membership, and news of Valenti’s kindness has since mushroomed into something much bigger.

“It’s been unbelievable so far—the output from the community and everyone who’s contacted us,” X-Sport Fitness manager Justin Pritchett told the Tribune. “We’ve had people from all across the nation, from all different states, all different media” respond.

Pritchett said a federal officer called the facility to donate a membership to another youngster who can’t afford one, and others wanted to reimburse Valenti for his contribution, though Skokie police nixed that idea.

Several callers told Pritchett “they think it’s absolutely one of the most wonderful stories they’ve heard in a long time.”

X-Sport is also now working with Skokie police to create a partnership program to help youth gain memberships at the fitness chain.

The character of public servants can have a tremendous impact on communities, and character formation takes many adults from different parts of a community focused on the formation of youth.

“Moral education can work where the community, and schools and other institutions within it, share a moral culture that is integrated and mutually reinforcing; where the social networks of adult authority are strong, united, and consistent in articulating moral ideals and their attending virtues; and where adults maintain a ‘caring watchfulness’ over all aspects of a young person’s maturation,” James Davison Hunter writes in The Tragedy of Moral Education in America.

The Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues offers a framework for schools to strategize about the community building process, focusing on connections with community groups, businesses, other schools, and universities.

One school’s gift to another lifts spirits after Hurricane Irma

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Students at Woodrow Wilson Middle School in Clifton, NJ, are learning what it’s like to help others in need, a lesson on character catalyzed by a connection with a Florida school ravaged by Hurricane Irma.

Veteran Wilson teacher Fran Chiarelli learned about the plight of Pinecrest Elementary School in Immokalee, Fla. through Cindy Reinhardt Gerber, a Pinecrest teacher who worked with Chiarelli at a school in Clifton years ago, NorthJersey.com reports.

In early September, Hurricane Irma ravaged the Immokalee community, where 99 percent of the mostly migrant community lives in extreme poverty. The storm decimated trailers and wiped out the local tomato crop families in the area rely on to survive.

Pinecrest lost supplies, and local families lost their homes, clothes, and jobs in the storm.

Chiarelli relayed the situation to Woodrow Wilson Principal Maria Romeo, and the two organized a two-week fundraising drive that involved the entire school community, which also includes a high percentage of low income students.

“Even though we have many disadvantaged children right here in Clifton, they were able to give of themselves and realize the importance of helping other people,” Chiarelli told North Jersey.

Romeo said the experience is tied in with the district’s focus on character education by giving students the opportunity to learn empathy.

“A disadvantaged student here may live in an apartment with a roof over their heads,” she said, while kids in Immokalee are struggling with life in “the hull of a trailer.”

“It was a good opportunity for them to understand poverty on a completely different level,” Romeo said.

Woodrow Wilson students, parents and staff, baked and sold their goods, while students also raised money through class “penny wars”—a competition to collect the most change. After two weeks, the school raised nearly $10,000 to help Pinecrest buy cots for the community, bags of food for families, and other essentials.

Pinecrest Principal Susan Jordan told North Jersey the donation was by far the biggest the community received in the wake of Hurricane Irma, though other local communities also contributed to Immokalee’s recovery.

“It gives us a level of comfort so we can do what we want to do and what we need to do and know it will actually happen,” Jordan said.

That type of gratitude is what philosopher Laurence M. Thomas describes as “the most basic sentiment of interpersonal interaction.”

“There is no greater sign a people are socially invisible than that they not be seen as meriting gratitude for the good that they do on behalf of others,” Thomas wrote in The Hedgehog Review, a publication of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. “When a person acts with good will towards another, then she or he is acknowledging that the other has moral value. Gratitude is a natural response to being so treated.”

The gracious donation from Woodrow Wilson students also belies concerns about America’s focus on materialism that dates back to observations by French diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville in 1833.

Tocqueville worried that “America was devolving into a nation of self-sufficient Robinson Crusoes,” researchers Arlie Hoschild and Sarah Garrett wrote in The Hedgehog Review. “If we are too individualistic, if we devalue moral sentiments, Tocqueville thought, our attention will then turn to materialism. Speaking of Americans in 1833, he observed that the individual arising from their relative equality ‘lays open the soul to an inordinate love of material gratification.’”

Tocqueville was concerned that Americans would become obsessed with the material, and focus less on virtues like gratitude and empathy that strengthen communities.

The Florida donation proves students in New Jersey understand gratitude and generosity, but it also goes beyond that to help to build up both communities through service to others.

Resources on helping others, like “How Would You Help?” from the Jubilee Centre, can help students understand ways they can give back to their communities.

Parents vs. administrators on cameras in the high school bathrooms

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Administrators at Colorado’s Windsor Charter Academy Early College High School are now monitoring students on surveillance cameras inside bathrooms, and parents aren’t very happy about it.

School officials frame the situation as a safety precaution, and parents are raising privacy concerns, but the issue also raises questions about the school’s ability to instill character and responsibility in students.

Parents recently learned that officials at the high school installed four cameras in student bathrooms—two in men’s rooms and two in women’s rooms—as part of a new design that also includes floor-to-ceiling stalls, the Greeley Tribune reports.

“I was floored,” parent Trevor Garrett said.

Garrett and his wife Annie, along with another parent, confronted school officials about the new cameras in October, and demanded to know why parents were not informed. Annie said her daughters contend some girls change in the bathrooms and have a “reasonable expectation of privacy,” phrasing used by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Rebecca Teeples, executive director of Windsor Charter Academy Schools, told the news site the cameras, which allegedly focus only on the bathroom wash stations, were included in a redesign of the school, which opened this year.

She confirmed that academy officials did not inform parents about the change, but noted that signs about the increased surveillance went up days before the cameras. Windsor Charter Academy attorney Bill Bethke argued that the wash stations are technically a public space, and insisted the new cameras and floor-to-ceiling stalls are designed to improve privacy.

“I would urge people to consider that the charter school is trying to improve the protection of privacy, but in doing that drawing a line between the private space and the public space that is new and that people will learn to use appropriately,” he told the Tribune.

Teeples added that the cameras are part of the school’s focus on monitoring all public spaces on campus to ensure students are safe.

“Every decision we make, we make to make sure our students are safe as possible in our school,” she said.

The Garretts, meanwhile, have vowed to pursue a lawsuit if necessary to force school officials to remove the cameras.

While much of the debate about the cameras centers on privacy, it also raises serious questions about responsibility and character.

How have we arrived at a place where we can’t trust students to use the bathroom?

In her book Adult Supervision Required, Markella Rutherford observed that, “Parents have been told [since the 1980s] that children and adolescents must be adequately supervised at all times, which has had particularly dramatic effects on how children spend their free time and engage in peer relationships. The need for constant adult supervision has also constrained children’s opportunities to demonstrate meaningful responsibility and be recognized for their independent contributions. By stressing parents’ supervisory role, the boundary line between adult and child is reinforced, and childhood is constructed as a period of dependence, irresponsibility, and incompetence.”

The ultimate goal is to cultivate moral autonomy in students, so they can make responsible decisions on their own and be held accountable for their actions.

Resources on “good sense” from the Jubilee Centre help educators assist students in cultivating a moral compass that helps them make good decisions.

Library reaches out with gratitude tree

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The Healdsburg Regional Library is offering students a unique way to show their gratitude, and it couldn’t come at a more opportune time.

Wildfires that raged through Sonoma County and Napa Valley, Calif. in October left many in the area scrambling for safety as flames devoured their homes and belongings, but the library’s new Gratitude Tree is helping some to cope with the destruction, The Healdsburg Tribune reports.

Many Healdsburg residents were lucky enough to avoid the fires, Healdsburg librarian Charity Anderson said, but children in local schools haven’t escaped the reality that’s left friends and families in dire straits.

“The tree is exactly what it sounds like,” Anderson told the news site. “It invites people in the community to say what they’re grateful for and creates a beautiful art piece.”

“This is a good way for children to say what they’re grateful for, which is really important after the fires,” she said.

The idea for the Gratitude Tree started this summer, well before several fires scorched nearly 200,000 acres, consuming roughly 8,400 structures and killing dozens of people. Four children’s librarians from around the county came up with the low commitment idea to engage children for Gratitude Month in November using a tree, with paper leaves kids can use to write what they’re thankful for and hang from its branches.

At the Healdsburg library, officials unveiled the tree, which sits near the children’s area earlier this month, and it’s already filling in with leaves expressing thanks “for the first responders of Sonoma County,” “friends and family,” and other hopeful messages.

The Tribune notes that the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN) emphasizes how wildfires often leave children with fear, worry, distress, and anxiety. The damage, both physical and emotional, stems from concerns about loved ones, separation from their families, and can lead to behavior problems, as well as problems sleeping or eating.

“Even in the most difficult situations, it is important to identify some positive aspect and to stay hopeful for the future,” the NCTSN advises. “A positive and optimistic outlook helps children see the good things in the world around them. This outlook can be one way to help them through even the most challenging times.”

Robert H. Frank also observed the intersection of gratitude and behavior in The Hedgehog Review, a publication of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia.

Frank pointed to the “large body of research by academic psychologists who have studied how the emotion of gratitude affects people’s behavior.”

“The general finding is that gratitude makes people not only happier and healthier, but also more generous toward others,” he wrote.

In other words, gratitude is infectious, particularly in folks who acknowledge that their good fortune isn’t entirely their own making.

“Interesting enough, gratitude is often stronger in people who believe that they have been lucky rather than in those who believe that success is solely due to their own efforts,” Frank wrote. “Subjects who’d been asked to recall a good event and come up with external causes—many of whom mentioned luck explicitly, or cited factors like supportive spouses, thoughtful teachers, and financial aid—gave more than 25 percent larger donations than those who’d been asked to offer internal causes to explain the good event.”

The fires in California have undoubtedly left many in the Napa Valley region grateful to be alive, and many surely recognize that prevailing winds, an act of God, or some form of luck played a role.

The Healdsburg Gratitude Tree provides an opportunity for local students to reflect on that reality, and share their gratitude for avoiding the terrible fate that befell their neighbors.

Anderson told the Tribune that’s something worth celebrating, and she now plans to keep the Gratitude Tree up through the end of the year to continue to spread the message of hope.

“Maybe we’ll even put Christmas lights on it,” she said.

Lessons from the Jubilee Centre can help students practice the virtue of gratitude in the classroom.

$2.1M commitment to Georgia character education program

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Business and school leaders in Bibb County, Georgia, want to ensure every student has the tools to form the habits that form good character, and they’re putting their money where their mouth is to make it happen.

The OneMacon Business Education Partnership teamed up with Bibb County schools to launch a fundraising campaign in March, and officials announced this month that they’ve raised $2.1 million to expand a pilot “Leader in Me” character education program to all of the district’s elementary and middle schools over the next four years, The Telegraph reports.

“Believing and doing require a lot of effort, and you all have made a lot of investment in this community,” said Blake Sullivan, Business Education Partnership co-chairman, at an assembly at Vineville Academy in early November. “We’re going to have some of the best schools in Georgia.”

District officials implemented the Leader in Me program at two local elementary schools during the 2015–16 school year, and expanded the program to two others last year. The new funding means it will now roll out in the remainder of the district’s elementary and middle schools in coming years, superintendent Curtis Jones said.

The program was developed by Sean Covey, with the FranklinCovey company, in 2009, and it’s based on The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, a book penned by Covey’s father, Stephen Covey. FranklinCovey also donated 10% of the $2.1 million fundraising goal, with the rest coming from other businesses and community donations.

The Leader in Me program, which concentrates on changing the culture and climate of schools, is already in place in 3,500 schools in 55 countries, according to the news site.

“It’s a systematic approach to building 21st century skills in children and in staff members and in the community,” Covey said, adding that he hopes the Bibb County program will provide a model for other communities to follow. “There’s so much instability in the world today. You need a framework of your own and a set of core principles to found yourself on and skills, like taking responsibility, goal-setting, resolving conflict. This is basic blocking and tackling of being an effective and happy person today.”

Jones said the Leader in Me program is designed to change how students think, with the hope that they’ll carry the message into the community.

“It allows our students to really learn how to display strength of character,” he told The Telegraph. “Those words are easy, but how do you do it? Students are asking, ‘What do I do?’ Now we say, ‘You can practice the seven habits and that will help you demonstrate strength of character.’”

The habit-forming approach to good character certainly isn’t anything new, but rather a tradition that dates back to the famed philosopher Aristotle.

“It makes no small difference . . . whether we form habits of one kind or of another from our very youth,” Aristotle wrote in Nicomachean Ethics, “it makes a very great difference, or rather all the difference.”

The Leader in Me program offers sample resources at TheLeaderInMe.org for educators interested in the habit-forming curriculum.

“With over 40 age-appropriate activities in each activity guide, teachers can use the activity guides to introduce and teach the 7 Habits and other foundational leadership concepts to elementary students,” according to the site. “These activities are aligned with Education Standards and with skills for the 21st Century. The lessons in the guides are flexible and can be assigned daily, semiweekly, or weekly according to the available time in each classroom.”

St. Louis program focuses on ‘character instead of curriculum’

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AESM Middle School in downtown St. Louis is implementing a new character education program in hopes it will make a positive impact on students’ lives well into the future.

“If you don’t have good character traits,” principal Ceandre Perry told KMOV, “students can struggle in the real world.”

“So we want to make sure we’re equipping them right now with those ideas in order for them to be successful in high school and go on into the real world,” he said.

The news site highlighted how the “new school program focuses on character instead of curriculum.”

“Instead of focusing on just math and science, it stresses nonacademic growth that will help students long after they leave school,” KMOV reports.

The three-year “Character Plus” program was funded through an unspecified grant.

KMOV provides very few details on what the program actually entails, but the news report illustrates a fundamental problem facing character education, as well as other important issues like moral formation, and social and emotional learning in schools: they’re viewed as education extras that are not necessarily elements of a “real” or traditional academic curriculum.

The fact is, whether or not educators and the media formally acknowledge character education or moral formation, students are learning both through daily life at home and at school. It’s often part of a “hidden curriculum” that will determine if students lead a flourishing life, or something else.

Plenty of students get straight As in school, but flunk life miserably.

An intentional focus on character and morality in the daily school rituals is a positive step in the right direction, but it’s only one of several important elements. Character education programs that are ultimately successful also push students and teachers to commit to a particular view of reality.

If a program is not rooted in strong particular commitments, what the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture terms “particularity,” then it will not withstand the assaults of daily life.

The Community School for Social Justice in the South Bronx and the Ron Brown High School in Washington, D.C., are two examples of public high schools with very strong particular commitments.

Lack of courage at the heart of nation’s political crises

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In a passionate piece in The Atlantic that criticizes all corners of our current political world, Eliot A. Cohen diagnoses us all as suffering from a character crisis. While there are many “forces and phenomena in play,” he writes, “it is character that remains the issue that confronts us in almost every story about national politics . . . ”

“Of all the elements that constitute character, courage is the essential one. Physical courage is in part innate, in part something that can be inculcated by training and experience. The courage to take responsibility emanates more naturally from ambition. What is rarer and more difficult than either is moral courage.”

“As historian Allan Nevins put it, ‘moral courage is allied with the other traits that make up character: honesty, deep seriousness, a firm sense of principle, candor, resolution.’ And of moral courage there is an unquestioned deficit today—in the halls of Congress where the Republican Party has yielded what once were its values to an adventurer in the White House; in a White House presided over by a bully and a braggart who infects even upright generals with his breathtaking dishonesty; in universities where administrators and faculty yield to student mobs baying to be protected from uncomfortable ideas and unpopular individuals, and elsewhere.”

However, research from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture over the last five years would suggest that this crisis of character has been a long time in coming. Dr. Jeffrey Dill, in the “Interview Report” for the 2012 “Culture of American Families” report, noted that “. . . throughout all of the interviews—3,500 pages of transcripts—the words ‘character’ and ‘virtue’ were only used a total of 26 times by 12 different respondents (by way of contrast, the word ‘independent’ and variations of it were used 173 times by 60 respondents). We intentionally did not ask about character directly because we wanted to see if it would emerge organically. Parents clearly cared about the character of their children, but instead of using words like ‘character’ or ‘virtue,’ they used descriptive words like ‘good heart,’ ‘nice,’ ‘self-respect,’ and ‘self- reliance.'”

“Are these words adequate substitutes for ‘character,’ ‘virtue,’ ‘humility,’ ‘patience,’ ‘wisdom,’ or ‘courage’? That is difficult to measure, but words and language do convey meaning and ultimately shape human perceptions of reality. The words we use have the power to create the worlds we inhabit . . . This is especially true in the context of socializing the young. The words parents now employ . . . connote softer, more individualistic, and therapeutic meanings. We might think of them as less commanding or authoritative. The tension—or paradox—lies in the gap between the authority required to do what parents say they want—to form their children into the right kinds of people—and the language they use to describe it.”

Cohen concludes his essay by urging us “to recover an admiration of imperfect civic courage by flawed people, even in occasionally dubious causes. That is best done by returning to our own history, not in a spirit of hero worship, but of respect for the virtues that make free government possible. It is an educational motif out of style, and desperately needed.”

One way of doing that is to read the stories that can be found in great literature, both for children and for adults. In those stories we will find the embodiment of character in which we can participate, stories that give us a purpose greater than we find within us. Another resource is available from the Jubilee Centre: a secondary school lesson on the virtue of courage.

Student scientists eager to see the forest and the trees

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Fourth-graders at Colorado’s Fox Creek Elementary want to learn more about how to conserve the Backcountry Wilderness Area, an 8,200-acre preserve that borders school property.

Over the last three years, students have spent two hours a week studying the vast Douglas County outback through a partnership with the Highlands Ranch Community Association, which manages the 13 square miles of Ponderosa pines and Gambel oaks that’s home to a wide array of wildlife, from elk and pronghorn to wild turkeys and prairie dogs.

Each year, students compare ecosystems in the park, measure footprints, collect samples, look at temperatures, and conduct other field work.

“When the students come out,” camp director AnnaKate Hein told the Highlands Ranch Herald, “they are expected to be scientists.”

But something different happened this year. Armed with data and inspired by their time in the Wilderness Area, students requested to take the program to another level and put what they learned to use through a service-learning project.

According to the Herald:

To raise money for the project, Fox Creek students hosted a hot chocolate stand at Haunted Forest, a popular event in October organized by HRCA. Backcountry staff expected students—15 kids on each of the two nights—to bring in $100. They profited upward of $500.

Hein said students will likely work on constructing bluebird houses in open spaces or working to protect the ponderosa pines from elk, which often use the trees for cover.

“Science isn’t always about having the right answer,” Hein said. “Our big goal is to keep kids questioning.”

The Backcountry Wilderness project will certainly help local plants and wildlife, and forge a closer connection between Fox Creek and the HRCA, but it’s the students themselves who will undoubtedly benefit the most.

The service-learning project is part of an ancient tradition that’s known as “becoming by doing.”

Aristotle wrote in “Nicomachean Ethics” that “states of character arise out of like activities.”

By doing science in the Backcountry, the students are becoming scientists. By taking responsibility for protecting and caring for the Backcountry, the students are becoming responsible citizens and naturalists, virtues they’ll likely carry into adulthood.

Educators interested in incorporating similar service learning concepts into their classrooms can find materials and lesson plans by iCivics and others at ShareMyLesson.com.

UK officials scrap ‘landmark’ character education program

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Former British education secretary Nicky Morgan described a multi-million dollar character education grant program as “a landmark step for our education system” when she unveiled the plan in 2014.

Now it’s gone, replaced by new Education Secretary Justine Greening with an Essential Life Skills program that’s geographically restricted to 12 areas in the country designated as social mobility “cold spots,” TES.com reports.

The $4.5 million Character Grant program was rolled into the larger, $28 million Essential Life Skills program, though education officials did not mention the change when they announced the new program in early October.

“The government has also announced today that £22 million will be shared among all 12 Opportunity Areas through a new Essential Life Skills programme, to help disadvantaged young people have access to the same opportunities as those in the top-performing schools. The aim is to help them develop wider skills such as resilience, emotional wellbeing and employability. The programme will complement the individual Opportunity Area plans by providing extra-curricular activities, such as sports, volunteering and social action projects, which give pupils the opportunity to develop leadership skills,” according to the government announcement.

The death of the Character Grant program was revealed by Morgan, author of Taught Not Caught: Educating for 21st Century Character, after she pressed parliament about the fate of her Character Grant program. Education official Nick Gibb responded in mid-October that the program “has closed.”

“The term ‘life skills’ is a bit utilitarian and does not say much about flourishing,” Morgan said.

“The proof is in the pudding—let’s see which organizations get the funding,” she said. “If it goes to develop the same character traits, I understand if that means a change in its focus to these areas.”

The government announcement cites important virtues like “resilience” and “emotional wellbeing” as elements of the new initiative, but it’s clearly more focused on “employability” and “access to opportunities.”

“Local independent partnership boards—made up of school leaders, business owners, council leaders and other local partners—will work to boost attainment from the early years of a child’s education right through to university. Other initiatives include projects to raise aspirations, by providing all young people in Opportunity Areas with at least four inspiring ‘encounters’ with the world of work, for example through work experience or mentoring,” according to the government news release.

While building collaboration between schools and the community is critical for the success of any program, the new focus on “life skills” over character education failed to recognize the essential role character education and moral formation play in preparing students for work and life.

Johann Neem, senior fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, argues that shift from a more liberal education to specific life skills for college and career readiness seemingly ignores the importance of instilling character virtues.

“Society needs philosophers . . . but not everyone must become one,” Neem wrote for The Hedgehog Review. “Instead, a liberal education would develop the skills, knowledge, and dispositions or virtues necessary to use philosophy’s insights to inform action in the world.

“Unlike the pure philosopher or sophist, the ideal orator ‘unites wisdom and eloquence,’ knowledge with skills and virtue,” he continued.

A character education framework can guide educators in public schools to intentionally integrate character into their classrooms, regardless of unsupportive policies.

“That remains a worthy aspiration for the graduates of our public schools, some of whom will become philosophers and scientists,” Neem said, “but all of whom are human beings and citizens.”

H.S. Football: West Milford seniors pay it forward

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West Milford High School football coach Don Dougherty is teaching his players how to “Punt, Pass & Read.”

The New Jersey coach told NorthJersey.com that when he took over as head of the varsity team in 2012, his focus was as much on devising offensive and defensive strategy as it was on what his players are doing off the field.

“From the beginning I felt the need and importance for our student athletes to give back to their community,” Dougherty said. “I wanted to put academics and athletics together for a good cause. Introducing that combination to the younger kids in our community makes a lot of sense and it promotes the importance of education and hometown pride.”

The effort also puts school sports in the proper context as a model for life, one that shows students there’s more important things than the numbers on the scoreboard.

Six years ago Dougherty launched the “Punt, Pass & Read” program to get West Milford players into local elementary schools, where they spend two days reading to youngsters throughout the school district.

Now, the program is spearheaded by seniors on the team who don their game jerseys to visit all six of the district’s elementary schools. Each year, they spend about an hour at each school reading to and talking with students, and the result is bringing the community closer together, they said.

“It’s really cool to see the students’ reactions and their smiles when we walk into the classrooms,” said senior captain A.J. Bakunas. “It means a lot to them for us to come in and read and just spend time with them. I know about this program when last year’s seniors participated and it’s something I’ve looked forward to being a part of.”

“I saw a lot of joy and smiles on the kids’ faces,” added senior Dylan Purdy. “They all wanted to interact with us and I thought that was great. I hope this program makes the kids want to read more. The younger students look up to us as role models and if they see their idols interested in reading hopefully it will want them to read more.”

Dougherty contends local elementary students aren’t the only ones benefiting from the program.

“The entire week is a humbling experience. It allows the seniors to reflect and see where they came from and how far they’ve come as student athletes. We’re constantly preaching hometown pride and staying home. This program touches on everything and it’s something we plan on continuing for years to come,” he said.

“All the students and staff at the schools really embrace the program and it’s something they look forward to every year,” Dougherty told NorthJersey. “The younger students ask the players for autographs and the teachers get to spend time with their former students who are now seniors in high school. It’s just a rewarding experience for everyone involved.”

Parents “want their children to develop into loving, morally upright, and hard-working adults who preserve close ties to their families,” according to the “Culture of American Families” report from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.

Parents believe that “fame, athletics, popularity, and power matter little in the larger scheme of their children’s lives,” so it’s a powerful dynamic when athletics can be a means to forming the good character that parents want for their children.

The Positive Coaching Alliance helps coaches, leaders, and parents understand double-goal coaching: winning and teaching character.