The Cool Kids’ Table

SAHAJ SHAH WAS SITTING ALONE in the cafeteria on his first day at Pflugerville High School, 16 miles outside Austin, Texas. A recent immigrant from Bahrain, Shah didn’t know a soul. He spoke English with a heavy Middle Eastern accent. He was 8,000 miles out of place.

Before the lunch shift ended, a stranger stopped at Shah’s lonely table. If this had been a Hollywood movie, Shah would have been bracing for some kind of rude comment or prank. Not at Pflugerville High. Instead, the boy asked if Shah would like to sit with him and some other students to get acquainted. Shah answered in the universal language: a big smile.

“I was really surprised by how inclusive everyone was,” says Shah, who graduated this year. “Today, that guy is a very good friend.”

There are many communities around the country—most of them, actually—where teachers do their darndest to instill thoughtfulness and respect in young adults. At Pflugerville High, it’s often the kids who do the teaching. “When the rivalry between two of our schools was starting to turn a little nasty,” says teacher Dixie Ross, “it was a student who suggested making that game a time to honor first responders—military, police, and fire—so that it could bring us together instead of pulling us apart.”

Unity can be a rare commodity today, so you’d expect that Pflugerville works at it constantly, like prospecting for oil in the Texas desert. In fact, it’s the opposite. “Here,” says Ross, “niceness seems to be the default mode.”

What does that look like? It means that the cool kids’ idea of a “prank” is when the girls’ soccer team hid out in the school late one day so they could paper all 2,250 lockers with sticky notes. The notes read “I believe in you!” and “You’re the best!”

And it looks like the band’s pay-itforward campaign, in which students handed out stickers to anyone they heard sharing a compliment. “They

“With Pflugerville students, niceness seems to be the default mode.”