• Research as part of a thesis
Local Star Valley resident Maggon Osmond has developed and is releasing an app called Kindness Matters that promotes positivity in the schools among students.
She says she has worked with LCSD No. 2 to beta test the application and has found positive results so far. She even used to work in the district, spending about 10 years working in it.
“What I noticed over that 10-year span is our kids struggle, especially in secondary schools,” Osmond said. “There’s subtly a culture shift and a lot of that has to do with the change in our communications style.”
She says this change has come in our current social media apps and has helped to create some negative behavior issues educators have to work through to teach in schools. She says she saw some of that in her time at LCSD No. 2. It inspired her to try and do something about it.
The Star Valley resident says she wouldn’t call her app a social media application, but a private social network. She says the kids will only see the feed for their specific school as well. The way it works is the students will witness someone doing an act of kindness and then post it.
“But the student that posts it, is anonymous,” Osmond said. “You don’t even see who it’s posted about. You only see the act of kindness. It’s a very designed not egocentric, but rather altruistic.”
She says school administrators will have access to the backend and so they will be able to see who performs the act of kindness. She says this could present an opportunity for a reward structure if educators choose to do so. She also says her beta test did not include any reward system, but still received a positive response.
In the app you can give a reaction to the post such as a “like” or “heart” and it notifies the student that performs the act of kindness.
“Even though you don’t know who that is,” Osmond said. “So, you’re sending out ‘thanks, I noticed that you did this’ without even knowing the person.”
She did extensive research as a part of a thesis to help build the new app. She highlighted the data shows what doing things like this will produce.
“Noticing acts of kindness has the same positive influence as performing an act of kindness,” Osmond said. “The research shows that there is no difference.”
The former educator says this has gone further than she originally thought it might.
“We have talked to the Department of Education in Wyoming,” Osmond said. “They are putting us as a link to their project AWARE.”
That project is Advancing Wellness And Resiliency in Education (AWARE). She says it is already a part of 13 districts in the Cowboy state already.
“They are implementing this app,” Osmond said. “As a way to change that culture.”
She says its whole design is to help with that through kindness and does so by changing what the students focus on. She says she has also partnered with a company out of Utah called Stand 4 Kind, a company that has been around the last 15 years.
“My app ended up being the perfect additional resource to their entire umbrella of support structure,” Osmond said. “Their company actually goes into schools, diagnoses the problem, and brings in the resources to help.”
She says Stand 4 Kind was also given a grant from the federal government to pull data from schools these intervention programs were in. Osmond says the data was so positive the company’s director will present to a panel in Washington D.C. how to prevent school shootings.
She is watching out for some kind of national endorsement for apps, which can move things along very quickly.
