FAIRVIEW PARK, Ohio -- After watching Gilles-Sweet Elementary School have success last year implementing the "Start With Hello" program, Lewis F. Mayer Middle School followed suit with a recent student assembly promoting inclusion.

"We heard how engaged the Gilles-Sweet kids became in terms of sharing kindness amongst each other," Lewis F. Mayer Middle School Associate Principal Jordan L. McHugh said.

"So there was just this opportunity to restart the conversation knowing that some students had already gone through it. We can keep that a part of their annual calendar as a touchpoint each year."

Previously Lewis F. Mayer Middle School employed elements of the "Start With Hello" program, which is sponsored by nonprofit Sandy Hook Promise. The initiative teaches students the skills they need to reach out and include those who may be dealing with chronic social isolation.

The idea is to create a culture of inclusion and connectedness within the classroom and school.

"We want to tackle the isolation," McHugh said. "There's a tendency as kids come up into the middle school, we see withdrawn students eating lunch on their own. It's not necessarily bullying, just isolating. Kids feeling like they have no friends or it's hard to make friends.

"So we wanted to take that angle to remind ourselves how to be kind to one another and little things we can do every day that might spread that little bit of kindness and make the lives of our schoolmates all the more enjoyable and tolerable."

Already McHugh said the "Start With Hello" introduction, which included a drone photo of students spelling out the name of the program on the football field, has yielded positive results. There's a pledge wall where students reflected on ways they could show kindness to others.

"Kids loved it," McHugh said. "There were post-it notes on the pledge wall. We've seen those acts of kindness happening in people helping each other out. We've had notes left on people's lockers. There's been kindness throughout the building. My hope is that it becomes more present in everybody's language and everybody's sort of approach to school life and life in general.

"You can only do so much in a limited scope of time. I think we hit the ground running. Next year not only will we have maybe another drone picture and pledge wall, but we'll tack on some of the other elements moving forward to make it bigger and more successful."