School program teaches Bibb County students that everyone can be a leader

A zoologist, brain surgeon, teacher, nurse and lawyer — these are the future careers envisioned by students at Sonny Carter Elementary School.

Sonny Carter, like all public Bibb County schools, is a part of the Leader In Me program.

Leader in Me is a learning structure developed by FranklinCovey Education, modeled after Stephen Covey’s famous book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” 

Bibb County school teachers integrate the seven habits into their students’ daily curriculum. The habits include mantras such as “be proactive,” “seek first to understand. Then to be understood,” “synergize” and “begin with the end in mind.”

Fifth-grade Sonny Carter student Laklarah Porter said her favorite habit is “synergize” or “work together to do better.”

“When you work together, you get more things completed, and you get to share your work with each other and make new friends,” she said.

Porter is a part of the Lighthouse Leadership Club which helps implement school initiatives and plan events like a trash
pickup program.

“When we were first introduced to Leader In Me, honestly, our students really did not have the lens for Leader In Me,” Sonny Carter principal Latricia Reeves said.

The kids thought of a leader simply as a line leader, she explained, but the program highlighted other types of leadership.

Students learned to be both leaders for themselves and problem-solvers for their community.

Leader In Me, according to 11-year-old Jalanna Jones, taught her the importance of setting an example for her peers and showing them the difference between right and wrong.

It’s been a decade since the county first implemented Leader In Me as a pilot program at Sonny Carter and Burdell-Hunt elementary schools. 

“I really have seen it transform our school,” Reeves said. “Everybody really views themselves as leaders.”

She has worked at Sonny Carter for 20 years and said she wouldn’t want to be without the program. The school has achieved Lighthouse certification three times, an achievement that must be recertified every two years. Sonny Carter is one of 15 Bibb County schools to reach Lighthouse status.

How Leader In Me came to Macon

The Leader in Me program took root in Macon after a 2014 visit to Raleigh, North Carolina by businessman and community leader Blake Sullivan.

Sullivan met and shook the hands of students at A. B. Combs Leadership Magnet Elementary School, the birthplace of The Leader In Me program. 

In 1999, A.B. Combs principal Muriel Summers developed the successful learning structure that would eventually reach schools nationwide.

Integrating the program’s seven habits into school curriculum made up for a deficit in soft skills being taught at home, according to Sullivan.

“Problem is we have, today, a culture (where more) parents work outside the home during the day and we have a lot of divorces,” he said. “The child is the one that suffers because they don’t get to spend the time to learn leadership skills from mom and dad.”

Impressed by how articulate and leadership-driven the kids at A.B. Combs were, Sullivan had a “lightbulb moment.” He wanted to bring Leader In Me to Macon schools.

“My father always told me when I moved to a community to always give back,” said Sullivan, who moved to Georgia in 2001 and owns a forestry company in Americus.

Sullivan worked with OneMacon — a group of Macon citizens, business members and community leaders focused on community growth and strengthening education — to launch a pilot program for Leader In Me. 

Sonny Carter and Burdell-Hunt elementary teachers attended a symposium and learned how to implement the seven habits into their existing curriculum. The Bibb County School District and Greater Macon Chamber of Commerce funded two pilot programs at Sonny Carter and Burdell-Hunt for the 2015-16 school year.

The county saw immediate results: referrals, which are when students have to be written up for disrupting class, decreased significantly, according to Sullivan.

Students created a culture of positive peer pressure, instilling the idea that true leaders don’t cause disruptions to the learning environment.

Before learning about the seven habits, kids didn’t understand the purpose of school, Sullivan said — it was something they did because they were told they had to. The Leader In Me, however, encouraged students to think about who they want to be when they grow up by documenting weekly and long-term life goals in a notebook.

Logan Henderson, a fifth-grade Sonny Carter Lighthouse Club member, remembers attending a daycare with paintings of outer space on the walls. Henderson later learned about Mae C. Jemison, the first Black woman in space, and aspires to be an astronaut one day. 

Another student, Xavier Cotton, said his favorite habit is “seek first to understand. Then to be understood,” because it taught him how to be a better listener and take the time to understand others.

“Once you learn [the habits] then apply them, they stick with you for the rest of your life,” Sullivan said. “There’s nothing rocket science about this.”

On the heels of the pilot programs’ success, Sullivan wanted to implement  Leader In Me in more Bibb County schools. 

He came to an agreement with then superintendent Curtis Jones to raise the money to implement the program if the school board continued to maintain it. 

Sullivan raised a total of $2.8 million in 2018. Leader In Me can now be found in all Bibb County School District classrooms. 

He also raised money from the state legislature to implement Leader In Me in nearly 300 Georgia schools and said he hopes to spread the program throughout the state.

“I want [Georgia] to be known for leadership,” he said.

Leader In Me has ushered in a “generational shift,” Sullivan said, “We’ve cast a vision to these kids about what’s possible.”