See, but you must consider the audience. I worked at a Kindergarten for about a year and part of my job was to observe and report on the children's social-emotional development. I can tell you that at that age, they're still trying to work out emotions and developing the ability to process and cope with how they feel. The article really makes it seem like they're putting a restraint on the children's ability to express something other than positive emotion.

Furthermore, as a child gets older, they begin to experience the concept of stress. They tend to want to be more social and fit in with their classmates, experiment with different cliques, and better develop their hobbies and interests. With these factors come stress, be it drama between friend groups or anxiety about fitting in or juggling school and hobbies. While suggesting positive energy to children at this age is healthy, enforcing it may only stress them more. A growing child MUST have some sort of outlet for negative emotions in a learning environment, insisting that a child must omit happy positive energy regardless of whatever issues they face is simply ignoring a district-wide issue that should be addressed.

Lastly, high school students in this district are arguably the most emotional group in this district. Stress on the child is now through the roof, as they are now experiencing body changes and mood swings, a difficult relationship with parents, pressure to have intimate and platonic relationships, keeping a job, deciding their futures, maintaining good grades, participating in extracurricular activities, etc. Many begin to experience depression and/or anxiety due to issues with self-identity, problems within personal relationships, sudden life events, a sense that the weight of the world is on their shoulders, whatever the case may be. An alarming percentage of these teenagers do not have the opportunity to medicate or find an outlet for these feelings. Now, these teenagers are pressured to maintain a positive energy? That sort of installment is very silencing to children who need to be able to vent their negative emotions. If I was a child in that school and I had the whole "positive energy" thing encouraged or enforced, I would feel silenced and trapped and as if my administrators don't care about their student body as individuals.

It is always okay for a learning environment to encourage children to be happy, but the way to do that is to give them an outlet and teach them that it is okay to feel sad or stressed or scared or angry, and it's okay to express those feelings. You teach, not enforce. You give resources, not rules and regs. You address the issue, be it depression or bullying or what have you, you do not sweep it under the rug and hope that taking the easy route will solve it.