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When students step into Oak View Elementary School, they face a tree mural listing seven habits and walk across a huge rug with a lighthouse reminding them to be beacons of light.

Throughout the school, there are reminders of the advice in the self-help book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen R. Covey.
 

The school has begun the second year of a program called “The Leader in Me,” which adapts the book’s lessons for children.
 

“We’re not trying to develop CEOs,” said Pat Abondolo, the school’s curriculum facilitator. “It gives them the qualities to succeed in whatever they want to do. “We’re giving them so much more than a test score.”
 

When fifth-grader John Saunders Jr. was learning about Martin Luther King Jr., he learned that King exemplified two of the habits: being proactive and “synergizing.” The 9-year-old “puts first things first” by doing homework before playing and “sharpens the saw” by getting good sleep.
 

Guilford County Schools pushes schools to help children build character, and the Covey program gives the staff a system for incorporating it into day-to-day school life, teachers said.
 

“This seems to be the bridge,” said music teacher Cindy Helms.
 

One other GCS school, Archer Elementary, uses the Covey system, Oak View’s staff said.
 

Helms reinforces the habit to “begin with the end in mind” by discussing with students how they can prepare if they want to be in the end-of-the-year talent show.
 

The students also learn to “think win-win” and “seek first to understand, then to be understood.”

The school weaves respect and kindness into the program, too.
 

Tanya Trent, a fifth-grade teacher, said she can work the habits into every subject. The Covey system has improved teachers’ outlook, too, she said. The staff tries to incorporate the habits into their own lives.
 

“If we don’t learn it, how can we expect to teach them?” Trent said. “Here I am teaching the next great leaders. You can see the pride they take in themselves, seeing themselves as leaders.”
 

Teachers said the program has been carried into the students’ homes because teachers and the children talk to their parents about it.
 

Abondolo said the system has significantly reduced the number of office referrals for behavior problems.
 

The High Point Chamber of Commerce paid for the staff to train for the program last summer.

Contact Jamie Kennedy Jones at 373-7088 or jamie.l.kennedy@news-record.com.