The checkmark is from the status checks output indicating a check was OK.
Displaying Unicode characters on terminals needs to be set up sometimes. Running this before running status checks should fix it:
export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
export LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
We do this in some of our scripts. (EDIT: And by “our scripts” I mean the Mail-in-a-Box source code.)