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As the first bell rings on a new school year, students at St. Mary’s Nativity School in Raceland are learning how to live a more virtuous lifestyle through a discipline method that encourages positive change, a step that has certified the elementary school as the first in Louisiana to use virtue-based discipline practices.
Virtue-Based Restorative Discipline, created by Lynne Lang of the Archdiocese of St. Louis, Missouri, provides a foundation for fostering right choices at school and at home through direction from administration, teachers and parents.
Over the last year, a team from St. Mary’s, facilitated by Kelly Smith and Kristie Cenac, attended training conferences with Lang, relaying the techniques that aim to uplift students in a constructive manner to the other teachers at the Lafourche Parish Catholic school.
During the school year, students frequently gather for class meetings about living out values like unity and kindness in their daily lives. Classes often participate in prayer circles as well to strengthen their relationship with God. Activities already part of the academic year, such as the Christmas pageant and Way of the Cross, are infused with virtue-based lessons to further instill the program’s goals in the students.
When discipline is necessary, students initially have a time of personal reflection in which they focus on the virtues they have learned. They then meet privately with their teacher or principal to discuss the issue and pray together. This allows them to create better habits that reflect God’s ways.
The program began last school year, Cenac explained, with partial funding from a grant received from the Rev. Wilmer Todd Foundation, established by the retired priest to benefit church parishes within the Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux. In June 2015, St. Mary’s Nativity School was certified as a school of distinction operating under these practices.
During the first mass of the school year Friday, in which all students, faculty, administration and many community members were present, Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux Bishop Shelton Fabre presided over mass, encouraging the students to focus on compassion. The virtue, he said, is aided by other virtues, like love, to allow us to see things the way others see them.
“Sometimes we all need a little bit of help,” Fabre explained. “The most important thing about compassion is that compassion invites you and me to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes or say, ‘What if this had happened to me? What would I want?’ Compassion invites us to view the situation from the other person’s perspective.”
Following the mass, students released balloons in celebration of the accomplishment and commitment to choosing more positive, faith-based habits. Each balloon had a note attached with the one virtue each student wished to work on throughout the year.
Throughout the process, Cenac said the students have been incredibly receptive to the discipline program.
“If the children would not have cooperated and opened their hearts last year, we would not have been able to receive this distinction,” she said.
