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Post-it's Plastered on Lockers: Nest Notes Random Acts of Kindness

Post-it's Plastered on Lockers: Nest Notes Random Acts of Kindness

BY BETHANY BIRCHFIELD - Student Journalist, North Harford High School

      On February 14, 2017, North Harford journalism and yearbook students put together a surprise to brighten every student’s day. On Valentine’s Day, every single locker in the school was plastered with a sticky note containing a message for it’s owner. Students in Mrs. Chandler and Mrs. Harward’s classes spent time designing personalized notes for the 1,600 lockers that are on campus, as well as teacher’s doors.

    The idea is that when students came into school, they could either keep their compliment, or they could stick it on a friends locker to add positivity to their day. It’s a way for everyone in the school to participate in a random act of kindness.

    Journalism teacher Jennifer Chandler and Yearbook teacher Carla Harward came up with the idea after attending a workshop. "We got the idea from our Jostens Renaissance workshop that we went to down at Dulaney High School. We wanted to bring more positivity and togetherness to our school, we wanted to bring some unity to our school. We felt that this was a starting point, and just a steppingstone to other things that we would like to implement and do to make the culture in our school a positive one," said Harward.

    The two staffs decided to collaborate on this big project in order to spread love to every student and teacher on the international day of love. Chandler stated, “We thought it was a really easy way to sort of spread positivity among our students and staff. Often times Valentine’s Day is a really tough day for lots of students because they sort of feel like they’re left out since it’s such a couple's kind of thing, and this way everybody was guaranteed to have something positive during the day.”

    According to Chandler, this Valentine’s Day surprise was a massive undertaking. She stated “Mrs. Harward and I were very fortunate that we both had staffs who stepped up in a huge way to make sure that it happened. Even though there are going to be naysayers and negative nellies about what we do, we think the positive outweighs the negative a million times over."

    As both a Journalism and Yearbook staff member, Junior Maria Kropkowski wrote an abundance of notes for her peers. She reported, “It was a lot of hard work, but I think it’s a great idea to spread positivity around the school. Everyone needs a little positivity."

    When students came in on Valentine’s day morning they were greeted with a compliment to brighten their day. Freshman Ryan Blosser reported, “My first reaction when I saw the sticky notes was that it was really nice, because not a lot of people have valentines and it was just a nice thing to do to make everybody happy. These people took a lot of their time to do these sticky notes just to make somebody’s day”. Blosser stated that his favorite message he saw all day was one that said “you are loved”, he said it made him happy and brought a warm smile to his day.