Bethel Park partners with WQED to plant ‘Kindness Tree’

Bethel Park will partner with public television station WQED to spread kindness through its school district.
School officials hope kind deeds spread like the branches of a tree, which also is the symbol of WQED’s Kindness Initiative.
The project started in the aftermath of the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting. In the spirit of Fred Rogers, the station’s most famous television personality, WQED asked children in the community to complete a Kindness Tree by writing stories of kindness to represent its leaves.
The station has now expanded that idea to a multi-media initiative with a website, www.wqed.org/kind, and a variety of events featuring several community partners, including school districts.
Bethel Park will decorate a wall in each of the elementary schools with a Kindness Tree and students will be encouraged to share stories of kindness, either when someone was kind to them or when they were kind to others.
Older students will give kindness cards to each other. Students are supposed to pass the cards whenever they show kindness to another student. When a student receives a kindness card, he or she is supposed to pass it on by doing something kind for someone else.
Superintendent Dr. Joseph Pasquerilla noted Bethel Park worked with WQED before, to offer more science, technology, engineering, art and math programs.
“They’ve been a great partner with us and I think this will also be a great initiative,” he said at the school board committee meeting April 16.