These Butler County students have found the perfect way to celebrate Valentine’s Day

Hundreds of Compass Elementary students will sing together about kindness, respect and compassion this morning as part of a program that hopes to grow its work in Fairfield’s schools.

All this week, the students have learned about the importance of kindness and compassion with the help of LoveWorks, a 3-year-old Fairfield organization that promotes paying kindness forward. The programming this week also reinforced the school district’s ongoing character education initiative, said Angie Kenworthy, one of the founders of LoveWorks.

The students will gather to sing the song together.

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Students have participated in activities including second-graders writing “thank you” cards for the city’s police and fire departments, first-graders reading “Words in Your Heart,” which emphasizes the power of words and first- to fifth-grade students playing “Random Acts of Kindness Bingo.”

“Kindness is contagious,” Kenworthy said. “It gets students at a young age looking to pay kindness forward … and how to treat one another just with kindness and respect.”

The song students will sing this morning was written by Compass music teacher Erin Williams for LoveWorks, and all 800 students will wear red LoveWorks T-shirts.

Compass Elementary principal Kim Wotring said she and her staff were “100 percent on board” when LoveWorks presented the idea. Teachers and staff continually are teaching students to treat each other with kindness.

“They’ve got the power to make a change in the world, and in our small little world of Compass Elementary,” she said.

Eventually, LoveWorks plans to do special programming at each elementary school each year. It elected to start with Compass Elementary.

“We don’t want to have this negativity in our community,” Kenworthys aid.

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