“You are enough!”
“Every sunrise is a fresh start.”
“Broken crayons still color.”
When Geneseo Middle School students arrived for class one recent morning, messages like those were found on every student’s locker thanks to two of their classmates, 8th graders Leila Bries and Reese Schaaf.
It all started in February, when a representative from Rachel’s Challenge came to GMS to share the tragic, but inspirational, story of a teenager in Colorado, Rachel Scott. She was the first victim of the Columbine High School shootings on April 20, 1999.
With the help of Rachel’s family, Rachel’s Challenge works to create safer schools by helping end school shootings, youth suicide, and bullying, and addressing the youth mental health crisis by spreading message of kindness and compassion.
While many of Geneseo’s middle school students pledged to be kind to classmates and others throughout the community by signing a challenge banner, Leila and Reese decided to go above and beyond.
“Rachel was known for doing all these acts of kindness,” said Leila. “She made everyone's day better by helping them out in little ways. I was just like, well, what can we do to help people spread kindness and be kind to everyone?”
Inspired by Rachel Scott, who according to Rachel’s Challenge, “believed that kindness could change the world,” Leila came up with the idea of sending positive vibes throughout GMS in the form of hundreds of Post-it notes.
She shared the thought with Reese, then the two ran it by Mrs. Haars, who teaches language arts at the middle school, and with the school’s blessing, got to work.
“I thought it was an extraordinary display of kindness and leadership,” said Mrs. Haars. “Their goal was simple yet powerful: to remind every student that they matter, they are important, and they are special.”
“We hung out after school one day and we were like, let's just start on this,” said Reese. “We started looking up quotes that were inspirational. At first, our messages were way too long. So we started searching for simple messages and looked at the Kindness Rocks Project for ideas.”
Reese and Leila took advantage of any free time they could find–before, during and after school–to write their messages of kindness and hope on a total of 800 Post-it notes with a common goal in mind.
“I think that everyone can be reminded that they're loved and that they matter,” said Leila.
When the day came to get the Post-it notes onto lockers, the girls arrived early and enlisted the help of Mrs. Schmidt's daughter, Elouise Schmidt, and Mrs. Haars’ daughter, Adelia Haars, as well as some of their friends: Annie Reed, Lilly Wilshusen and Ellie Jackson.
“We didn't really care if people knew it was us doing it,” said Leila. “We just wanted to make people smile.”
“Hopefully it helped a bunch of people,” added Reese. “Some people made jokes about it, but that’s OK. I saw a bunch of girls taking pictures of them with their phones and others just smiled.”
Leila added, “Whether or not they took it seriously or not, it still made them smile. I thought it was really cool to see the hallways brightened up with the different colors of notes on our lockers. It was also really cool that every single person got one.”
Mrs. Haars applauded the pair’s commitment to fostering a more inclusive and supportive school environment.
“Reese and Leila demonstrated compassion, initiative, and the desire to make a difference in the lives of others,” said Mrs. Haars. “Their selflessness and dedication to spreading kindness deserve to be celebrated, and I wholeheartedly believe they embody the values we hope to instill in all of our students.”
Nearly 25 years after her tragic passing, Rachel Scott and her story still resonate with students like Leila and Reese, and inspire them to show kindness in their own ways.
“To me, kindness means doing a simple act just to help someone out,” said Reese. “I think of my parents and all my friends who support me, and how nice they are to me every day. I just want to just bring that to everyone else.”
“I think kindness is choosing to do what's right over doing what's not,” said Leila. “You can walk past a pencil sitting on the ground, or you can pick it up, and hand it to the person you know. It doesn't have to be anything big.”
As one of their Post-it notes suggests, “In a world where you can be anything, be kind.”
