Last week a revolution took place here at the school: a kindness revolution. The counseling department, led by Ms. Zarin Kapadia and Ms. Claudia Vasquez, joined other high schools across the country in Kindness Week, a national movement dedicated to spreading positivity and kindness.

Our school’s Kindness Week has been in the making since last year when the counseling department first discovered the nationwide kindness movement. “We had wanted to do more school wide activities to promote kindness last year,” Ms. Kapadia said. “When we looked it up we saw that Kindness Week was a national event, and we decided that we wanted to prepare for that here at W-L.”

Preparations involved planning activities that students could do to be kind to their peers. One of the main events of Kindness Week was the Great Kindness Challenge, involving checklists of multiple random acts of kindness that students could do. “The goal [of the checklists] is to do as many kind acts as possible,” Ms. Kapadia said. “In addition to that the goal is also to promote that little things can be kind, like smiling at someone, or telling someone to have a good day, or giving someone a compliment. It can really change someone’s whole day.”

Last fall the counseling department sponsored Anti-Bullying Week, a time when the counseling department campaigned for spreading kindness and to stop bullying. “We modeled Kindness Week to be a continuation of spreading Kindness,” Ms. Kapadia said. “It’s gone really well, and we’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from it.”

To spread the word the counseling department has been using #WLKindnessRevolution on social media. Ms. Kapadia hopes that this “revolution” can make a large impact on the student body. “We wanted to show that every little thing you do matters,” she said. “If everybody took a minute to do one kind thing a day, I think it would really change how people interact with each other.”