This Cannot Be Done Without You

No Wordle’s.  No iPads.  No blogfolios.  No SmartBoards.  No Skype’s.  No 21st Century Learning.  Not even 20th Century Learning.  No amount of global connectedness or educational technology will make this happen.  And, it appears, no amount of money, seminars, interventions, blog posts, or acts of discipline can will it into existence.

This cannot be done without you.

Nothing extraordinary happened this week at the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School.  This is not predicated on an event.  If anyone thinks this is connected to him or her, s/he is mistaken.  There is no crisis nor emergency.  There is simply honesty.

This cannot be done without you.

I have written 14 blog posts about “Community of Kindness”.  We have invested thousands of dollars in new programming and interventions.  We have hosted Parent Forums.  We have preached from the pulpit.  We have made faculty and student movies. We have meted out significant consequences.  We have accepted responsibility.  I have made a number of personally awkward phone calls or meetings with parents.

This cannot be done without you.

We are not unique.  Having recently returned from a national conference, I am reassured to note that issues of kindness rank high on all administrators’ lists of priorities and that we are all struggling with similar issues.  Although it is somewhat comforting to know that we are not the only Sisyphus pushing the kindness boulder up the hill, it resolves nothing.  We share resources and uncomfortably shrug shoulders.

This cannot be done without you.

There is nothing poisoning the water in Jacksonville.  The students, teachers, and families of the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School are not uniquely unkind.  We want our school to live up to our highest Jewish values.  We want our children to feel safe, protected, nurtured and loved within (and without) our walls.  In my heart of hearts, I cannot believe that anyone doesn’t have the best of intentions.  And yet.

This cannot be done without you.

Facebook.  Instagram.  Twitter.  Minecraft.  Text.  Skype.  Who knows what else?  It is true that our ability to be unkind has gotten easier and faster.  It is also true that we have dedicated class time and coffee talks to digital citizenship.  Pushing unkind behavior from the playground to the PlayStation does not satisfy.  Our ability to be kind has not gotten harder.  We just have to remember to practice it.

This cannot be done without you.

Birthday parties.  Play-dates.  Sleepovers.  Concerts.  Virtual Gaming.  Who is included and who is left out?  Which children come to school having shared an out-of-school experience and which children come to school having lived through its exclusion?  For that matter, which parents?  And how many of our teens and parents are forced to confront their exclusion via social media as pictures and videos of what they are missing are paraded, exchanged, and liked before their eyes?

This cannot be done without you.

I am as guilty as anyone else.  I have children in our schools.  They have friends and they have acquaintances.  They have play-dates and sleepovers with the former, but rarely with the latter.  I use social media.  We have become obsessive self-documentarians and I am no different.  I want to provide friends and family a window into our lives and social media allows us to.  Have I unthinkingly posted pictures of such play-dates and sleepovers without thinking through the consequences?  Absolutely.

So this cannot be done without me as well.

I am not in despair.  We are not giving up.  We have had successes.  Students refer to “community of kindness” in the lunchroom and during their Bnai Mitzvah speeches.  We continue to reward kindness and penalize meanness.  I continue to push myself to intervene in the grey areas.  Our middle schoolers are attending an important play on the topic this very afternoon.  We have a movie screening coming up for our teens and parents.  And, most importantly, our teachers care deeply and are willing intercessors in the lives of their students.  When children are in our care we can, in fact, ensure communities and kindness.  But.

This cannot be done without you.

No amount of programs, interventions, assemblies, blog posts, sermons, coffee talks, dollars, hand-wringing, or complaining will make us into a community of kindness.  And no amount of saying “Community of Kindness” will turn us into one.  It will take simple, everyday acts of kindness, piling up one on top of the other, day after day, week after week, until one day we look up and realize that we are, indeed, a community that is a little kinder than it once was.

Please, God, let that day be soon upon us.