Word: Dignity

Sentence:

Dignity is being treated as worthy before you have anything to prove.

Passage:

A student could walk into Sullivan with an entire story already attached to them.

Behind in credits. Special education. Foster care. Chronically absent. Discipline history. Transfer student.

Sometimes we knew more about what had gone wrong in a young person’s life before we knew what made them laugh.

That is one of the dangers of labels. Some of them are necessary. Schools need information. We need to understand what a student needs, what support has been provided, and what happened before they arrived. But somewhere along the way, information can become identity.

A student who struggles becomes a struggling student. A student who gets into a fight becomes violent. A student who misses school becomes lazy. A young person who makes a bad decision starts carrying that decision into every room they enter.

The label does not change the child, but it can change the way we see the child.

I saw that happen at Sullivan. The school itself carried a label long before many of our students ever walked through the doors: failing school, safety concerns, a place on the brink of closure. If people already believed they knew the story of the school, it became pretty easy for them to believe they knew the story of the kids inside it too.

But that was never the whole truth.

Our students were artists, athletes, caretakers, scholars, leaders, friends, brothers, sisters, and dreamers. Many were carrying things outside of school that would have been heavy for any adult. Some needed more support. Some needed to be pushed harder. Some made mistakes that required consequences. None of that made them less worthy.

At one point, we created a list of students who needed extra attention from adults in the building. These were students we worried about, kids who were struggling with attendance, behavior, academics, or things happening outside of school.

We could have called it an at-risk list. Instead, we called them the “Kids We Love the Most.”

The name was intentional. They were not problems to solve. They were children to know.

And I think that language changed something, not about the students, but about us.

When you call someone a problem, you start looking for the problem. When you call someone a kid you love, you start looking for the person. You ask another question. You stay a little longer. You wonder what might be underneath the behavior instead of only reacting to what you can see.

That does not mean lowering expectations. If anything, I think dignity asks more of us. It means believing someone is capable of more without making them feel like less because they have not reached it yet. It means holding people accountable without humiliating them and correcting behavior without deciding the behavior is who they are.

The closer I got to our students, the harder it became to reduce them to any single part of their story. There was almost always something else there: a reason beneath the anger, a strength hiding behind the struggle, a talent that had not been noticed yet, or a story that made the behavior make a little more sense, even when it did not excuse it.

I do not think this lesson belongs only in schools. 

We do this to people everywhere. We meet someone and quickly decide who they are by where they live, how much money they make, the job they have, the mistake they made, the way they speak, the support they need, or the story we heard before we ever had a conversation with them.

Once the label feels complete, curiosity usually ends.

Maybe dignity begins with staying curious long enough to remember there is always more to a person than the easiest thing to name about them.

Our schools are some of the first places young people learn what the larger world might think of them. They learn whether struggle brings shame, whether mistakes follow them forever, whether needing help makes them less capable, and whether people will keep seeing possibility in them when they cannot see it in themselves.

That makes dignity more than a school value. It is practice for the kind of society we want to live in: one where people can be challenged without being diminished, held accountable without being discarded, supported without being pitied, and seen for where they are while still being given room to become something more.

People do not need us to give them dignity.

They need us to protect the dignity they already have.

Your Turn:

 Who might you see differently if you looked beyond the label?

I always appreciate hearing what a word brings up for you. Don’t hesitate to comment or email me. I’m here!

Read past Match posts here: chadhthomas.com

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