Indian Trail program helps kids identify with school group

Indian Trail Middle School doesn’t have a sorting hat that will sing you a song, but a new program is grouping students into four houses, much like in the Harry Potter books. The effort was inspired by a trip a few teachers took to the Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta, which uses the same system.

Leading the houses are teachers Jordan Billings, Clint Daniels, Kelli Svatos and Jeremi Wonch.

“There’s a lot of kids that aren’t involved in some sort of extracurricular group, so we felt like this was a great way to get kids into some sort of group that they identify with, that they have something in common with,” Svatos said.

Teachers tested the program with part of the seventh grade during the fall semester and plan to fold in the rest of the seventh grade during the spring semester. By next year, the idea is for every student at Indian Trail to be part of the house system.

The teachers held a sorting ceremony where a random draw split the students into their four houses. It had one sure side effect: No one was absent that day.

“Literally every kid was there,” Billings said.

Students are not allowed to switch houses.

“When you would have kids going, ‘Man, I really want to be in your house,’ we’d go, ‘You know what? I really hope that my house picks you,’” Billings said. “As soon as you’re reaching into the cauldron, you’re just thinking as much as you can. And they’re all like, ‘You mean like the sorting hat in Harry Potter?’ I said, ‘Yeah, it probably takes (that) into account.’”

The names and themes of the houses — ‎Altruismo, ‎Amistad, Isibindi and ‎Rêveur — come directly from the Ron Clark Academy. Each house name is in a different language and reflects a different quality.

The academy provides guidelines for how to implement the system as well as an app that keeps an updated point tally and can send parents positive messages about their child.

“A lot of times when you’re receiving school notifications, they are informative or they are about discipline issues, and what we wanted to do was change the narrative of how parents might necessarily view the interactions, not only between teachers but between the school,” said Junior Bernadin, dean of students at the academy. “… They can see, ‘Hey, look. Johnny received three points today for academic excellence, along with a note from his teacher.’”

Positivity is a theme that runs through the various aspects of the house system.

“The tagline we have for us is ‘Four houses, one family.’ So we’ll have competitions, and we give house points and things like that, but we talk about how we have rivalries with houses,” Billings said. “We’re not against (other) houses, because each one of those houses builds up our school.

“So when someone in Altruismo is getting points, they’re building up our school. It doesn’t matter whether it’s my house or not. We talk about how that rivalry encourages us to be better.”

Teachers have seen the kids get into the house spirit. Billings said he’s has two or three students dye their hair blue for his house’s color.

Unlike the house system in Harry Potter, teachers do not remove house points for student infractions.

“We never take away points from a kid. … We don’t want it to be negative. It’s all positive,” Billings said.

Students earn points for being on the honor roll, helping another student, cleaning up something without being asked to do so and more.

The teachers and students all have an app that provides an up-to-date point total at any given time.

Right now, there’s no big plan to celebrate the end-of-year victor, other than to decorate the school’s commons in the winning house’s colors.

“We didn’t want an ice cream party. We wanted the reward to be, ‘Look at what you’ve done for our school,’” Billings said.

This story was originally published February 5, 2020 at 5:44 PM with the headline "Indian Trail program helps kids identify with school group."