GUILDERLAND — In an effort to ground students during tumultuous times, the Guilderland schools started teaching The Positivity Project this school year.

On Tuesday, the school board heard that the five elementary schools have embraced the project while challenges remain at the middle school and especially the high school.

The pandemic, said Lisa Knowles, the district’s director of pupil services, highlighted the need to support students’ social and emotional needs.

In December, the United States Surgeon General issued an advisory on “the urgent need to address the nation’s youth mental health crisis.”

The Positivity Project, Knowles said, builds relationships, routines, and resilience. It also aligns with the state’s mental-health standards.

Over three years, Chris Peterson, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, led a 40-person team to better understand character. With Martin Seligman, he wrote an 800-page book, “Character Strengths and Virtues,” based on the research.

Seligman, in 1998, had chosen positive psychology as the theme for his term as president of the American Psychological Association, reacting against the profession’s emphasis on mental illness. Positive psychology focuses on eudaimonia, an ancient Greek term for “good spirit” or “happiness.” Practices that can contribute to this sense of well being may include social ties, meditation, spirituality, or exercise.

Peterson and Seligman’s book describes 24 character strengths they say have existed in all human cultures throughout time. They believe that people have all 24 strengths within them and that character is not just skills or behaviors, but rather an intrinsic part of each person.

Their thesis is that, if each child is made aware that she or he has all 24 character strengths, each child will have the foundation for self-confidence grounded in self-awareness. Children will also better understand how each person is different and how to appreciate those differences.

The Positivity Project posits that strength does not come from ignoring the negative. Rather, strengths help people overcome adversity. For example, a person can’t show self-control without first being tempted, or can’t be brave without first feeling fear.

Mike Erwin and Jeff Bryan have made a business out of instilling the principles of The Positivity Project in youth.

“We both graduated from West Point and deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan a combined five times for 52 months. But our desire to serve the nation didn’t end there. In fact, it was just the beginning,” they write on their business’s website.

“We determined that, pound for pound, we could make the biggest impact by empowering America’s youth to build positive relationships by seeing the good in themselves and others …,” they write. “That’s because our capacity to build strong character-based relationships is the cornerstone of health, happiness, and resilience – and will be crucial in meeting challenges of the future.”

Their goal is to reach 2,000 schools and a million students this year.

“Character is more than simply individual achievement,” Knowles told the school board on Tuesday. “It is the intersection of our thoughts, our feelings, and our behavior.” She showed a series of videos, featuring children in different district elementary schools, speaking about what they had learned from the project.

One of the videos featured a school therapy dog “talking” in a little girl’s voice. “People see things in different ways,” the dog advised, urging that we “learn from our mistakes.”

The 24 character traits provide a foundation for self-awareness and self-confidence, said Knowles and, at the same time, help children understand why everyone is different.

“Each school is putting its own spin on the Positivity Project,” said Knowles, describing T-shirts designed at two elementary schools, and displaying bulletin boards at other schools. Morning announcements stress the character strength of the week and parents, through school newsletters, are encouraged to have conversations with their children at home.

Elementary teachers have found the program “very flexible” and “easy to use,” said Knowles.

“Consistency really is the best way to change the climate and embed the traits into our daily life,” she said.

Middle school

Michael Laster, the principal at Farnsworth Middle School, displayed a character-strength calendar that showed lessons being taught in each class so all teachers speak the “common language,” he said.

The school’s morning television news show enhances each week’s theme, he said.

The Farnsworth building cabinet, a shared decision-making team, surveyed both staff and students mid-year about the program.

Student engagement varied with age, decreasing each year.

In the sixth grade, 63 percent of teachers felt their students were highly or moderately engaged with the program; by seventh grade, 45 percent were; and by eighth grade, just 23 percent described their students as highly or moderately engaged in the program.

In the staff survey, 52 percent said it took more than the 15 minutes allotted daily to teach the lessons.

The staff responses, Laster said, could be divided into four themes. Roughly 60 percent liked the program and wanted to continue while roughly 40 percent felt they already had too much to deal with, were overwhelmed, and wanted to stop.

The other themes were liking the topics but having reservations about the materials used to teach them or liking the topics but having reservations about the time used.

On the student survey, the middle-school students were split, about 50-50, on whether they liked the program in all their classes or just their core classes: English, math, social studies, and science.

Eighty percent of the middle-school students sometimes or often liked the lessons and 80 percent saw at least some value in learning about character strengths at school.

About half liked the videos and games included in the lessons and about half reported seeing some positive difference at Farnsworth Middle School because of the program.

The most frequent free response was “in pure middle-school language, ‘It’s boring,” said Laster.

Laster said the company has been “very responsive” to problems raised by Farnsworth staff and even removed one of the videos, dealing with suicide, when staff found it inappropriate.

He also thinks, the more students at younger ages are involved with the project, the stronger it will become. And he’s told his staff that next year “you now can put your own spin on it.”

High school

Ann-Marie Holmes, assistant principal at Guilderland High School, said her school is blending the Positivity Project with the suicide-prevention program already in place, Sources of Strength.

SOS, as it’s called, uses peer leaders to increase connections between students and adults.

The Positivity Project was introduced in videos during homeroom periods in September, she said, and the kickoff involved 100 peer leaders and 28 adults in the Sources of Strength program.

In October, the focus was on getting kids engaged and, in November, the focus was on gratitude. After the holidays, Holmes said, there was a struggle with the high rate of COVID-19 infections as the Omicron variant soared.

A pilot program was launched in January, involving just eight homerooms after which a survey showed “we have to identify how to get our kids engaged,” said Holmes.

Some staff would like to modify the lessons to fit the environment they’ve already created in their classrooms, Holmes said.

Scheduling shifts at the high school have caused problems, Holmes said, because the 10 minutes now allotted for homeroom don’t allow for the Positivity Project lessons.

One student put it well, said Holmes, stating, on a survey, that, while social-emotional learning is a priority, it should not be in a pre-fab product.

Knowles said that high school programs are often more student-led and that, as younger Guilderland students are educated in the program, they will naturally then take leadership roles.

School board member Rebecca Butterfield, a pediatrician, said she was worried that, by relying on other groups, there would not be a universal approach and some kids would be left out. “And those are the kids that we probably most want to reach,” said Butterfield.

For the next school year, she said, “I want to emphasize universality so that every student is touched.”

Holmes said she agreed completely.