Prospect High School guidance counselor Sandy Pifer is aware that students might be skeptical about a program aimed at fostering respect.
“This could really fall flat on its face, or if it works, it will be terrific,” said Pifer, who brought in all the bells and whistles she could think of Tuesday to celebrate the inception of The Knights’ Way, a program that has attracted 140 students who will champion issues such as responsibility, ethics, safety and pride.
The program kicked off with a mandatory all-school assembly, where students and teachers were ushered into the stands at the high school football field following the first day of classes for a value-infused pep assembly punctuated by the marching band, an array of student performers as well as a rented white horse galloping across the lawn, carrying the Prospect knight mascot.
Instead of pumping up the crowd before a football game, the event served as an attention-getting segue to the seven respect seminars which will be held throughout the year.
Pifer said she and Linda Tolchin, a Spanish teacher at Prospect, became interested in starting a program aimed at nurturing respect among teens and adults after visiting Deerfield High School in 1996, where a similar concept piqued their curiosity.
“We knew we had a great student body, and it wasn’t like we had a lousy school that we had to fix,” Pifer said. “It’s a good school, but we wanted to make it better.”
The school will survey the students and staff in September to see what issues need to be addressed.
From October to June, students will lead small groups of teens encouraged to discuss everything from curbing foul language, making wise choices and, above all, the proverbial golden rule–treating others as you would hope to be treated.
Indeed, Pifer realizes that the program could disturb those who believe that values and ethics should be nurtured at home, not in the classroom.
“We know that some parents don’t want us to teach values to their kids,” said Pifer. “But we are having the students themselves running the discussion groups. The teachers are not creating any special curriculum.”
Pifer and Tolchin established a steering committee enlisting 16 certified staff members, two students, a custodian and a security guard.
Teachers were asked to nominate dozens of students they believed could serve as role models, and letters were mailed out to 160 teens.
Roughly 140 teens accepted the challenge and attended a training session this summer that explained the 20-minute respect sessions which will begin in October.
Most of the students Pifer observes each day at Prospect are decent to one another, she said, but it never hurts to have a gentle reminder about appropriate behavior.
“When you get into an everyday routine at school, you can get sloppy and become callous to others,” she said. “We are letting our students be leaders, empowering them to bounce ideas off one another.”
