High school celebrates an entire year with no fights due to principal’s challenge

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (WMC/Gray News) - Students at a Tennessee high school won a cookout six years after the principal issued a challenge to the entire school to go a year without a single fight.

The students at Adamsville High School in McNairy made it through a school year without any fights, conquering a challenge first issued by Principal Steve Killingsworth in 2018, the year he was promoted to the position, WMC reports.

“One of the things I always tell them on the first day is the most important thing you’re going to learn in this building is not English. It’s not math. It’s not science. It’s not even history. It is how to get along with people,” Killingsworth said.

Senior Isabella Brown distinctly remembers Killingsworth’s first day speech.

“At first, it was kind of a ‘oh, I don’t really think we’ll get there,’” she said.

Killingsworth says he knew it would no easy task to get nearly 500 teenagers to go an entire year without a fight. He says in the world of social media, disagreements among students can escalate incredibly quickly, and peaceful conflict resolution is becoming a lost art.

“Each year, we’d get a little closer and a little closer, and I could tell the student body would be very disappointed when we lost it,” English teacher Kelly Wilder said.

Killingsworth says the key to finally crossing the finish line came down to one simple idea.

“It was a school effort. It was not one person or two or three people. It was everybody in the building who bought into this. Everybody bought in,” he said.

Killingsworth says teachers also played a role in preventing fights before they happened. One teacher made T-shirts that read “don’t make me lose my burger day” once the students realized they were getting close to reaching the goal.

“Once they realized that it’s not a discipline issue, they’re not in trouble for having a conflict or having a disagreement, that’s just part of life, then more people were willing to give us a chance to listen to them,” Wilder said.

The road to the cookout even included the school’s custodian, offering kids a place to cool off if situations became too tense.

“We’ll pull them out, take them outside, let them pick up in the front of the school, and I kind of talk to them like I think their papa would ‘cause I’m older,” custodian Teddy Hughes said.

Killingsworth says the school averaged less than 10 fights a year, but he says it wasn’t about that ― or even the cookout he promised ― it’s about creating better students.

“I hope they’ll be good people. They’re going to be lawyers. They’re going to be doctors. They’re going to be carpenters. They’re going to be mechanics. There’s lots of them out there, but there’s never enough good people,” Killingsworth said.

The principal cooked the celebratory feast himself, which included nearly 500 hamburgers and 150 hotdogs. He said he hopes they can celebrate again next year with a second full school year with no fights.