Assistant Principal Rene Maza is reminding everybody about the six pillars of character which are trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, citizenship, and caring.

Mr. Maza brought this program to Venice High School in hopes of getting students to be better people. “Sometimes we don’t know what a good person is,” says Mr. Maza.

Mr. Maza says that kids are exposed to negative influences from music, T.V, and movies and they hardly get any positive ones. Mr. Maza established this program in other schools that he has worked at. Nothing is going to change overnight, he said, but he hopes that slowly the campaign will influence students to do better. He has also asked teachers to incorporate character lessons into their teaching.

Character Counts is a program that was originally started by Michael Josephson to honor his parents. His goal was to get people to pay closer attention to their character issues in all aspects of their lives. He got many well-known people, such as celebrities, athletes, and politicians, to come up with the six pillars. Eventually he created a foundation and a website dedicated to this. The website announces that they’re “working to create a world where decisions and behaviors are guided by ethnics.”