Jan. 27, 2011 - On Thursday, Feb. 3, Leonard ISD will embark on a new initiative - Rachel's Challenge, and the school is asking parents to join them in the gym that evening for a community-wide assembly. The meeting will begin at 6:30 p.m. and will last for one hour. This will be a community-wide challenge in hopes of spreading Rachel’s life-changing message to everyone, and is age specific for Pre-K through twelfth grade. There is a website that offers more information at www.rachelschallenge.org.

Rachel’s Challenge is a chain reaction program named after Rachel Scott, the first person killed at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999. Her acts of kindness and compassion coupled with the contents of her six diaries have become the foundation for one of the most life-changing programs in America.

During the day, students will be shown powerful video/audio footage of Rachel's life and the Columbine tragedy holds students spell-bound during a one hour school presentation that motivates them to positive change in the way they treat others. This is followed by a separate interactive training session involving both adult and student leaders that shows how to sustain the momentum created by the assembly. The assembly creates the “want to” or desire for positive change. The training session teaches the “how to” and ensures that the positive impact will continue.

The evening event will include a powerful session with parents and community leaders. This session is similar to the assembly program and ends with a specific challenge to parents and community leaders, showing them how they can reinforce the decisions their youth are making. Entertainers, politicians, sports celebrities, educators, and even two Presidents of the United States have been impacted by Rachel’s Challenge. However, students are the target audience and they have proven that they will respond with positive words, attitudes, and actions.

Rachel had this theory that if one person can go out of their way to show compassion then it will start a chain reaction of the same. Rachel’s father, Darrell Scott, has spoken to a Congressional House Judiciary Committee regarding issues of school violence. He founded “Rachel’s Challenge”, a bullying and violence abatement program.

Parents and students are urged to keep this chain going by doing an act of kindness for another and watch the reaction in Leonard.

Rachel wrote in a high school essay, "People will never know how far a little kindness can go."