CCISD celebrates Start With Hello Week
By SEAN HANEY
Cove Leader-Press
This week was the start of CCISD’s annual Start With Hello Week.
Every year all the schools is the district participate in activities involving simply saying “Hello” to someone new.
The backstory behind this week comes from the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting on December 14, 2012, in Newton, Connecticut, where 27 kids lost their lives. The Sandy Hook Promise is the charity that started the weeklong initiative, in an effort to combat bullying and promote kindness and learning about making new friends.
For House Creek Elementary on Tuesday, the children colored different pieces of papers however they liked, and when the pictures were colored, they were cut out and put together. In the end, the pictures made a giant quilt.
First grader Paisley Sutton was one of the kids at House Creek Elementary participating in Hello Week.
“Because everybody’s different,” Sutton said. “My picture will look different than someone else’s, and it doesn’t have to be the exact same as somebody else’s.”
When Sutton was asked if she knew what was happening after the pictures were done being colored, she said, “It makes a giant quilt and then here’s a bunch of patterns too.”
“To me, it’s about the simplicity of kindness,” Amy Simpson, the school’s counselor for the past four years, said with joy. “It’s one of my favorite weeks. Start with Hello just helps kids understand that it takes something very simple to reach out.
Making a friend helps someone feel welcome, so that when they come to school, they feel like it’s somewhere they want to be. I was watching a kindergarten class this morning. And this little boy saw a kid sitting at a table by himself. And he said to the librarian, ‘He’s sitting by himself.’ And she said, ‘Well, what should you do about that?’ So he walked over there, and he said, ‘Hey, why don’t you come sit at my table?’
“That went along with Start with Hello. It was so fun to see someone so little, get that message and then apply that message.”
Third grader Kenna Vance talked about what it means to start up a friendship with a simple introduction.
“Hello means greeting someone and making sure they are ok,” she said.
Just like the rest of the school, the 3rd grade children were coloring the same pieces of quilt, but they were also writing sentences about being helpful and saying hello.
“It’s going to make a cool photo.” Vance said with a smile on her face.
Start With Hello Week has had a different activity going on every day across the district.
Before the school district began Start With Hello Week, they had a program called Rachel’s Challenge, focused on students coming together and standing up to bullying/violence. The campaign comes from the Journal of Rachel Cook, one of the victims of the Columbine shooting in 1999.