GETTING INTO THE ACT: San Marcos Academy promotes character education

Character, leadership, and service are the key components of a program incorporated into the San Marcos Academy Lower School this year. 

Sponsored by the Rotary Club of San Marcos, which meets weekly at SMA, Early Act is a service program for elementary students from ages 5 to 13. The mission of Early Act is to promote goodwill, understanding, and peace through the active participation of its student members so that with committed citizenship and effective leadership, they may improve the quality of life in their school, community, and global community. Its operation is closely linked to Rotary’s “Service above Self” ideal and provides the foundation and natural succession into service clubs. 

Early Act teaches and promotes positive character qualities. Each month, SMA Lower School students learn a Bible verse associated with that month’s character trait, and the student in each grade who best exemplifies that quality is knighted and presented with a medallion at a Friday Chapel. The first knighting ceremony took place Oct. 30 and a second ceremony followed on Dec. 3.

Knighted in October for demonstrating the trait of Friendliness were Lily Dawkins, Harlee Rains, Parker Nicholson, Easton Spruiell, Grace Skidmore and Erin Roberts.

Those knighted in December for demonstrating honesty were Asher Followell, William Doring, Cienna Rodriguez, Casen Nash, Jackson Bishop and Nathan McNeight.

During the spring semester, students will study the traits of compassion, respect, discipline and service. 

In addition to the knighting ceremonies, an Early Act Council, consisting of two students each from grades 3-5, will meet to help plan service projects and learn about leadership. Students will rotate as members of the council so that all students will have a chance to participate. In the spring, the Council will lead a San Marcos Rotary Club meeting program to share with them what they have learned during the year. 

Each meeting and each knighting ceremony ends with a recitation of the Four-Way Test, an ethical code which Rotarians have adopted as one of their guiding principles.

Service projects make up the final component of Early Act. Each year, the council will choose a local project and an international project. For 2020-2021, the local Early Act project will be supporting the homeless in San Marcos, while the international project will be supporting children with cancer in Mexico. 

SMA students and their families are working locally with the HOME Center of Central Texas by filling bags with food, snacks, or sundry items for the homeless of San Marcos. The HOME (Homeless Outreach, Mitigation, and Emergency) Center unites community efforts to comprehensively prevent and address homelessness and educate the community about it as an issue. 

Each grade level will collect items for one month for the HOME Center to distribute. Kindergarten classes collected food items during October, and the third grade prepared “warmth packets” in November. 

For the international project, all students throughout the year will collect plastic bottle caps which will be shipped to Mexico to be recycled. The Heart of Faith Ministries in San Luis, Potosi, uses the funds generated to provide chemotherapy treatments for children with cancer in Mexico. 

Amy Bawcom, SMA Vice President of Development and a member of the San Marcos Rotary Club, serves as sponsor for the Early Act Council and as a liaison to Rotary. Diana Lucas and Chris Goode are the faculty sponsors for Early Act.

A fun part of this character program will be the culminating event, a “Medieval Feast” in late April, which will involve the entire Lower School.