It wasn’t a cute kitten, a stunt, a beauty tip or rant that a group of Kalispell Middle School eighth-graders wanted to post on YouTube. Instead, they chose to post a video about empathy.

On May 22, Kalispell Middle School eighth-graders Sarah Randolph, Bailey Garnache and Joseph Steele sat around a table in the lunchroom — a centrifuge where social status is separated and defined by where a student sits.

This is why P.E. teacher Noah Couser’s homeroom students used it as a main scene in a two minute, 24-second-long video, “Empathy Can Change the World.”

“This is the main part of our free time that we get,” Steele said. “It’s probably when most problems happen because everybody is here from school.”

Grnache added: “There’s like different tables that all sit together like cliques.”  

According to Randolph, “And then there are the students that sit by themselves, which is kind of what we wanted to portray in the scene.”  

As Garnache put it: “We all see it happening every day,”  

In the lunchroom scene, a girl sits alone looking longingly over at packed tables. Another classmate notices and gets up to join her, bringing a smile to her face.

The lunchroom scene is only a small part of the video, which shows a montage of students sitting at a desk and speaking powerful lines about empathy.

The eighth-graders had just finished a unit in Couser’s health class on the topic of empathy — sharing or trying to understand another person’s feelings.

“I asked them how can we serve our school, how can we make our school a better place and a lot of discussion came up with — let’s make a video promoting empathy since that is truly the greatest need we have here as far as student-to-student relationships,” Couser said.

Students got to work looking at other online videos on similar topics, researching quotes and writing a script to define empathy, particularly the need for and the power of it, according to Steele and Randolph.

Couser brought in camera equipment and helped direct.

The entire process took about sixth months and involved about 15 eighth-graders. The experience drew Couser’s homeroom closer together, Garnache said.

The student-produced video, which went online May 4, had 4,870 views on YouTube as of Friday. The students hope with each view that someone thinks about how he or she can be more empathetic. Couser sent a video link to his colleagues with a set of discussion questions, which started a dialogue both in and out of state.

“What are the main areas in school where people feel left out?” Couser asked. “We had these same discussions when we were making the video. What’s one thing you can do to help promote empathy, or show empathy to people in your life or in your class?”

Garnache said the impetus for making the video, which was not a requirement, was to do a public service project in an impactful way, not a routine anti-bullying message.

“We always learn about bullying every year, but I felt the video was impactful because it was our own students that everyone sees in the hallways — or they know personally,” Garnache said.

Couser said he thinks empathy is a behavior that people can learn, practice and improve upon.

“Everybody’s capable of it, but whether or not you recognize that in yourself, I think, is something that sometimes takes a little prompting,” Couser said.

All three students agreed there have been painful times where they could have benefitted from an empathetic classmate at school.

“Especially among the girls there’s cliques that they just don’t like someone else because they dress differently or they said something,” Garnache said. “I’ve been there before. Maybe I’ve said something — they instantly all dislike me, or something, little things.”

Steele reminds people to “show compassion, because I’ve been made fun of for being overweight and I just hope people understand that it hurts,” Steele said.

At first, Randolph said they wanted to do multiple real-life scenarios but that proved to be overwhelming so they pared down the project.

Even going through the different scenarios had an impact.

“I don’t know about everyone else, but I saw myself in those situations. I saw what I would want someone to do if I were the victim and what I would do if I were the antagnoizer, or even just a bystander. It made me think more about my actions at school and my actions towards others,” Randolph said. “I like my line, ‘You need to step out of your comfort zone and be the reason someone smiles today.’”

Students were asked if they have seen a visible change in the school climate after posting.

“I’ve seen more in the hallways — people being nicer, not a lot, but I feel a change,” Garnache said.

Reporter Hilary Matheson may be reached at 758-4431 or by email at hmatheson@dailyinterlake.com.