Bringing Out the Best
Since 1997, Jacksonville Country Day School has emphasized Character Education as the cornerstone of our academic program. The Character Education logo is displayed throughout the school and emphasizes our targeted virtues: courtesy, self-control, kindness, honesty, friendship, forgiveness, patience and cooperation. Our desire is for everyone on our campus to adopt these virtues for a lifetime, habitually act in a manner consistent with these virtues and have the ability to reason about moral issues that test them.
The critical factor in educating children about acting in good character is deliberately modeling the behaviors we set out to teach, so our Character Education plan begins with faculty, staff and administrators. We continually measure all that we do against our mission statement, review our program and implement new strategies for teaching Character Education to help assure that what we say and do best exemplifies what we want our children to learn.
Each month, school-wide assemblies, classroom skits and songs emphasize a different virtue and community outreach projects, combined with daily opportunities to practice good character, all help the students learn to be moral individuals.
Service learning is an extension of our Character Education Program. Service projects are combined with learning objectives that are intended to positively affect the recipient and the provider of the service. Groups throughout the school - homerooms, resource classes, and Student Council - focus on service learning to emphasize the importance of finding ways to positively impact others.
