Ardale proud superintendent Stalo. We are delighted tonight to have uh principal uh Adams and her team with us this evening to share information regarding the words matter initiative at Sonnetson which is a schoolwide effort to teach students, staff and families the power of language um and its impact on relationships, learning and community. So welcome and thanks for being here this evening. >> Thank you for having us Dr. Stalo Chair Evans Becker and uh board members. We're excited uh to start with the mission of Robbinsdale because the mission of Robinsdale directly connects with the words matter um work that we're doing at Sonison. So the mission of Robbinsdale Area Schools is to inspire and educate all learners to develop their unique potential and positively contribute to their community. So, I'm here to talk uh about words matter and I brought a team with me because it's a team sport here at Sonison. So, I brought Shelinda Sherrod, our assistant principal, and Kelly Betszel, our social worker, and they'll be sharing in the presentation a little bit. There's also some other participants that are surprised at the end. So with that um I wanted to share a little bit about why we started uh a focus on words matter. Last year we started noticing a pattern a pattern of our students using unkind words and language with each other and with grown-ups. And as we continue to examine that pattern, what we saw was kids using the best language they had at the time and we also know that when kids are sad, mad, confused, upset, frustrated, the amount of language that they have shrinks. And so what we wanted to go about doing is thinking about rather than trying to consequence kids into positive language, what if we taught the power of their language and what if we taught them habits around language. So we've embarked on a year-long schoolwide plan to teach our students how powerful their words are. Our goal is to create a culture of kindness, respect, and inclusion. And we knew that we couldn't just do it with staff and students. We needed to wrap our whole arms around the whole thing. We needed families to be involved, too. So, what does uh what does words matter look like across uh the the school year? It's organized in monthly themes. So each month we are connecting a theme with our restorative practices and with our SEAL curriculum. So for example September we focus on just what are words and why are they powerful. October is all about kindness and action and November will be gratitude and compliments and we will go on from there. So what do students experience when they are engaging with word matter? First, daily announcements around words matter embedded into our morning announcements. Monthly classroom lessons that have read alouds, discussions, role plays. Uh we already are deeply invested in restorative practices and so embedding this work into our daily community building circles has been a really important practice. Then we've added many schoolwi…