Doherty Ethics Program

Each year in late October the North Colorado Springs Rotary Club partners with leaders and staff of Doherty H.S. and D-11 to deliver an ethics training seminar to all ninth-grade students at Doherty H.S.  We’ve been doing this for the last eleven years.  Essentially, every Doherty graduate passes through this program — more than 6,000 to date.  We believe this is Rotary’s largest high school-focused ethics initiative in the United States.  As in the past, for two full days in October, all the freshman Doherty social studies classes are involved in this program.  Our objective is to provide students with an understanding of the sort of ethical dilemmas that they might be expected to encounter in their high-school life—including really tough relevant issues such as teen pregnancy, drug and alcohol use, shoplifting, family abuse situations, cheating on exams, as well as teen suicide, and bullying.  The format:  a short introductory Power-Point presentation is followed by the students breaking-up into work-groups of about six freshmen.  Each work group is facilitated by an adult volunteer who is provided materials and instruction by the Rotarian classroom leader.  Each work group is encouraged to select a relevant and realistic scenario with an ethical component that they can discuss and work through, identifying an appropriate resolution.  Students are introduced to the Rotary Four-Way Test, a set of four statements that have served to guide Rotarians in business and life-decisions for the past seventy-five years.  The students then use the tenets of the Four-Way Test as a tool in helping to select an appropriate course of action and resolve their dilemma.  In the final part of the seminar, students from each group present to the entire class a summary of the dilemma their work group selected and how they resolved it, using the Rotary Four-Way test.