Every Wednesday, many students and staff alike don shirts at Mars Primary Center and Mars Area Elementary School reminding everyone to be the kind one first.

The #bethekindkid initiative began in 2019, when Rhoads Orthodontics helped provide money to purchase all elementary students shirts with that hashtag, which came and still come in the school district’s colors, blue and gold.

It’s a simple idea, but one that promotes kindness not only through literal writing on the shirt, but through an aesthetic unity brought about by the display of the school’s colors. Students and teachers demonstrate their school unity by wearing the shirts, and what’s a better unifier than a group of many different people coming together five days a week to learn and teach one another?

Schools are places of unity. Although a student body is usually made up of children from a local geographic area, they all have different backgrounds and home life, and school is where a child learns that their own life experience and living situation is not the only way to be. They may have a home life that vastly differs from their desk neighbor in the same homeroom.

And although it may take a while for a student to fully comprehend how much they learn through commiserating with their classmates, they may someday realize just how much their views have been shaped by their early classroom experiences.

By their senior year of high school, a student may look back and reflect on their memories of elementary school. Maybe they will think about their friends, their classmates and even students they didn’t really like that much, who all wore the same shirts on Wednesdays.

Because attending the same school as a child was enough to build a similar identity through that shared experience. And maybe that shared experience, and ownership of the same T-shirt design, will lead them to better understand other people throughout their lives, and #bethekindperson.

— ET