KEARNEY — In the first two weeks that Sunrise Middle School implemented the GiveThx program, over 400 messages of gratitude were sent amongst the faculty and staff.
The digital platform that allows participants to express their gratitude to one another was brought to Sunrise by band teacher Paloma Mena-Werth. Mena-Werth helped start the Sunrise Gratitude Project at the Kearney Public Schools middle school when COVID-19 was in its heyday. Teachers were doing different projects with their students such as gratitude journals or gratitude grams that were being spread throughout the school.
During the pandemic, Mena-Werth saw the positive effect gratitude had on the school’s environment.
“I just think it’s kind of this silver bullet for so many things that we’re dealing with with kids right now, and it touches on so many things that we want to do with kids as teachers in education because it touches on things like resilience and empathy and reduces feelings of isolation. All these things that we really want to build and encourage in our kids and in our school community,” Mena-Werth explained. “In education, time is so limited that we’re always looking for bang for the buck when it comes to time, and gratitude is something that you can insert really with like minimal time and get a lot of bang for the buck.”
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She began doing more research on gratitude, and she read the book, “Making Grateful Kids” by Giacomo Bono and Jeffrey Froh. She reached out to Bono, an associate professor in the psychology department at California State University, Dominguez Hills, about wanting to implement gratitude programs at Sunrise on a larger scale. Bono had been working with the GiveThx program, and he recommended it to Mena-Werth. The program was offered free to schools, and the Sunrise staff began sending notes of gratitude via GiveThx in the 2021-22 spring semester.
In the first month, over 1,000 notes were sent amongst the staff.
“It really was a big bridge builder for us as a staff when we introduced it last year,” she said.
When Mena-Werth learned it would be offered free to schools again this year, she jumped on board to bring it back to Sunrise. Staff members can log onto the website where they can select a trait for their co-workers such as positivity, honesty, caring, supportive, etc., and then send their message of gratitude. Participants can then see the data of the traits that co-workers associate with them as well as their past messages.
Since restarting the program at the beginning of November, over 400 messages have been sent at Sunrise. Horizon Middle School will be joining in soon, and other KPS schools have also expressed interest in taking part.
“People are excited by the idea of it, and I think when they see how simple it is to implement, then it’s very worth our time,” Mena-Werth said.
During a recent teacher in-service day, Bono and Michael Fauteux, executive director and co-founder of GiveThx, Zoomed with the KPS middle school staff to discuss stressors for teachers and students and how gratitude can help.
“They just did it out of the goodness of their hearts. They spent an hour kind of talking us through those things, and they’re just both really knowledgeable, thoughtful guys, so it was really nice to have that time with them,” Mena-Werth said.
Sunrise and Horizon plan to use the program throughout the school year. While participating in GiveThx is optional, staff members have been excited to see it back at Sunrise and to shower their colleagues with gratitude.
“Any positivity, whether it’s personal or professional, makes your job and your life better. And so, for us to have these little glimpses of acknowledgement, everyone likes to be acknowledged for the good things that they’re doing, whether it’s something spectacular or whether it’s just doing their job well, and this is encouragement for us to do that on a more consistent basis,” said Mena-Werth.