MISSION POSSIBLE:
to be the kindest school in the country It is an undercover agency, complete with passports, code names, phrases, agent levels and a secret mission. FARIDA MASTER stealthily enters the gates of Somerville Intermediate School one dark, winter morning to solve the mystery surrounding the surreptitious operation that the young agents are keeping under wraps.
It’s mission possible! The 165 agents at Somerville Intermediate exchange furtive glances and code breakers to work on a covert operation that not everyone at school is aware of. Mission Impossible star Tom Cruise, agent Ethan Hunt would be proud of the rookie agents who are learning fast! The Undercover Kindness Agency (UKA) is single-mindedly focused on targeting kindness. They are on a mission possible to prove that kindness is cool! The agents are taught how to identify someone who needs to be at the receiving end of kindness. The purpose of the mission is to encourage empathy with contagious acts of selflessness. Each week the UKA choose a secret
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mission to complete. Principal of Somerville Intermediate, Yolande Franke says the idea was to build the right culture of self-worth and confidence amongst students. “We want to be the kindest school in the country!” she says about empowering and enabling students to build a belief system with the right mindset. “It was a deliberate decision to instil values of kindness and graciousness so that when a students is confronted by a raft of situations at any stage in life, they are equipped to make a choice on how best to respond in a given situation.” The school has been developing the UKA program, and have made an intentional decision not to
publicly acknowledge it. Anonymity is the key to the programme, which in turn adds an element of excitement as undercover agents communicate secretly with their peers and facilitators of the program. “There is no overt recognition as it is not about rewards. It’s an underground operation with no glory attached to it. It’s simply based on the principle that making a difference for someone else through being kind is a reward in itself,” says Franke. Leading the Undercover Kindness
Agency is deputy principal Chris Hall who smiles saying, he couldn’t make it to the CIA, so he did the next best thing — start an undercover agency that encourages generosity of spirit. He quotes Mark Twain saying, ‘Kindness is the language that the deaf can hear and the blind can see. It benefits both the giver and the receiver’. “As a school we have a policy of zero tolerance to bullying and have strategies in place to prevent and respond to cases as they arise. This program has not been www.eastlife.co.nz
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