Anne Fox School Kids at Hope

I wanted to share the article below about the work being done at Anne Fox School. This article was published in, Kids At Hope (see page 20).

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Anyone who walks into Anne Fox Elementary School can feel the positive Kids at Hope influence, but the school principal and the town mayor won’t be satisfied until they’re living in a Kids at Hope community.

When principal Nick Myers first heard about Kids at Hope, his school faced challenges including significant disciplinary problems and toxic relationships between students and staff. Only 68% percent of students met state standards as measured by the Illinois Standards Achievement Test.

Four years later, every teacher and staff member, including custodians and secretaries, has been trained in the Kids at Hope belief system, which states that “All children are capable of success, No Exceptions.” Myers calls Kids at Hope the glue that holds all the positive outcomes together, and reports that relationships between students and staff are much more positive, disciplinary referrals are down, and that discouraging 68% figure has soared to 93%.

“If I left Anne Fox Elementary and went somewhere else, the first thing I would do is train the staff in Kids at Hope. You have to have that foundational belief before you can do anything else. Staff must accept no limits to the potential of the
children with whom they work. If they lack this belief, we will fail children and lower our bar of expectation either intentionally or subconsciously. The Kids at Hope model really spoke to our teachers. It’s a powerful framework, and it keeps them focused on why they got into teaching in the first place.”

After implementing Kids at Hope in his school, Myers knew how important it was for others to reinforce that belief in his students’ potential for success, and to understand how to put the Kids at Hope model into practice.

“We wanted our kids to be surrounded with Kids at Hope in the community. Kids have many shifts … they may be at day care in the morning, and then at school, and then at a different day care in the afternoon before they go home. We wanted everyone who has our kids to know this belief system.”

It was time to rally the town, so he wrote a proposal to become a Kids at Hope, Hope Square Community, spoke with a few local organizations, and ended up with 85 people from schools, the library, the mayor’s office, and community organizations attending a one-day Kids at Hope training. He credits Mayor Rod Craig for much of the turnout.

“It was an eye opener,” says Craig, of the training. “There were so many people in the room who were part of our educational community, and I thought, ‘We have to get more government on board with this.’” Craig has since become a vocal advocate for making Kids at Hope a community-wide initiative, and is working to get buy-in from the police and fire departments.

“You have teachers uplifting kids at school, but you have to have consistency with those messages at home and in the community,” he says. “We need to get our arms around it and say this is our behavior in Hanover Park, and we’re not going to accept anything less. When people start to see something like this that’s different and consistent, the intrinsic value of the community goes up.” People will say, ‘I want to live there.’”

Myers has formed the Kids at Hope Hanover Park Community Coalition for the organizations that have already joined Anne Fox Elementary on the Kids at Hope bandwagon: Einstein Elementary School, the Community Resource Center,
and the Hanover Park Park District. They meet regularly to talk about how they’re implementing the model and the kind of progress they’re making, which Myers says keeps Kids at Hope front and center. But, he realizes that getting widespread
community involvement isn’t going to happen over night.

“Here at the school, it’s been easy to implement the Kids at Hope model. It made sense to the teachers, and it’s been fun. Taking it into the community has been more challenging … but we keep working on it.”

In the meantime, Myers sees daily evidence of Kids at Hope’s positive impact. He speaks proudly of the fact that his secretary has her Four Aces cards, which define the important relationships adults need to develop with children, clipped to the bulletin board by her phone. And he recalls one moment at an all-school meeting that captures what Kids at Hope means to each life it touches. ey had asked a student from each grade level to read a portion of their Kids at Hope Passport to the Future to the whole school.

One of the Kids at Hope Universal Truths states that children succeed when they can articulate their future, and the Passport is a tool that enables kids to describe and envision a future filled with hope, opportunity and success. “This first grader named Rachel started reading her Passport about wanting to be a teacher, and her mother was just crying her eyes out. It was so powerful for all of us to see the students lay out what their future is going to look like, and to see how deeply touched that mother was.”

All children need a champion, and according to Rod Craig, Hanover Park is fortunate to have Myers. “Nick has my total, dedicated support. He has taken a school from the bottom to the top, and we are speaking in a different way in our community today. Kids at Hope is an example of how leaders of a community can help every child look at the world as a place of opportunity.”

And in the not-too-distant future, Myers and Craig hope that all children in their community will benefit from the fact that everyone around them speaks the language of hope.