'This Has Opened My Heart' [VIDEO]

Kids are crying. Kids are hugging. Kids are spilling their guts.

“ADD and dyslexia always made me an outsider,” one boy stands up and says. “Always made me look different in other people’s eyes. There were domestic violence issues at home,” he says.  “Right now, just talking about it, I’m shaking.”

The honesty in the Montville High School auditorium is heart-breaking. It is chilling. It is moving.

It is part of a session involving a small group of students, teachers and staffers, chosen to keep the momentum of the Rachel's Challenge program going, in the high school.

Rachel’s Challenge is a motivational and inspirational program that honors and is built around Rachel Scott, the first person killed in the Columbine High School massacre. Rachel lived a life of compassion and trust, reaching out to people in need and offering friendship and kindness to all.

In the high school auditorium, the kids are sharing their most secret feelings, their deepest suffering.

“I was in a really abusive relationship,” one girl says. “I want to forgive him. I think I can find it in my heart to forgive him and get him the help he needs.”

“This has opened my heart,” says one young man, clearly an athlete. “Even though I’m all tough on the outside…” he hesitates, his voice breaking. “I used to get picked on all the time.” When he was younger, he says, some people he was close to died suddenly. “Rachel’s Challenge helped me ease this weight off my shoulders and my heart.

“I try to be nice every day. I realize how much it means.”

Then he says, “I wear that mask every day. I’m not going to wear that mask anymore.”

David Gamache, who led the school and community sessions that took place at the high school before Thanksgiving, leads this one, too. He is training the kids and the students to be open, to be aware, to lead the change that will make Rachel’s Challenge matter throughout the entire school year.

Rachel herself is the model for the program. It is simple, it is easy, it is built on kindness and compassion.

“I have this theory,” Rachel wrote in a school essay, “that if one person can go out of their way to show compassion, then it will start a chain reaction of the same.”

Every student and teacher and staffer at Montville High School attended a Rachel's Challenge presentation, says Principal Chad Ellis. Hundreds signed the Rachel’s Challenge pledge.

The training session focused those emotions and helped start the kids and staffers on a mission to keep the emotion of Rachel’s Challenge going, and to integrate it into the fabric of the school.

Gamache says that after the sessions, students and teachers often come up to him to thank him.

“You want to thank me?” he asks. “Then do something about it.”

To read about Rachel's Challenge, click here.