Every Morning, This Teacher Spends 10 Minutes Giving Each Kid A Personal Compliment

November 19, 2015

One teacher can make all the difference.

Chris Ulmer, a special education teacher at Mainspring Academy in Jacksonville, begins each day by complimenting his students, one by one.

Ulmer said the change has been remarkable in his students, whose diagnoses range from autism to traumatic brain injury to speech apraxia to agenesis of corpus callosum.

"They all came from a segregated environment [from general education students]. Now they're participating in school activities, dancing in front of hundreds of other kids and in the debate club."

And while Ulmer agrees academics are important, he believes it's even more important to reverse the psychological damage that came from being made to feel like an outcast.