Sandra Lopez, from the Sandy Hook Promise, gave a presentation about how to create an inclusive community at Creekview Intermediate School Thursday morning. Creekview officials were able to tie this into their “Start with a Hello” campaign this week, where they taught students to befriend those who are lonely, open up to others and prevent bullying.
(Journal-Tribune photo by Jacob Runnels)
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Bullying has adapted through technology, but educators in the county are working to stop the problem before it starts.
Staff from Creekview Intermediate School have been working all this week to implement strategies of teaching a culture of inclusion through the Sandy Hook Promise. These events ranged from having students pass inspiring notes to each other to having a speaker come in and talk about the importance of socializing with others.
Creekview counselor Angela Dillahunt said these are efforts to teach empathy and kindness to students. Through this, she said students will learn positive traits to combat the rise of negative ones.
“That’s really what they need at this age and that’s what they struggle with at this age,” Dillahunt said. “That definitely helps prevent a lot of problems that could have been happening in the past.”
With the partnerships they have with parents and students, Dillahunt said empathy and kindness is getting easier to teach to students. She said more students are opening up about their problems to teachers.
Creekview Principal Tim Kannally said the school is strategic at identifying negative behaviors. He said bullying is monitored by all school officials, and intervention activities are being employed to correct any bad behaviors.
“Typically when kids make mistakes with interpersonal skills and socialization, we coach them up, intervene, talk about strategies and work with families,” Kannally said. “We don’t have kids really repeating mistakes very often.”
Kannally said he’s noticed his pre-adolescent fifth and sixth-grade students are “impulsive,” and tend to say things that aren’t thoughtful. He said that can lead to a negative interactions between students. He said it’s at this age they need to learn how to “self-regulate” their actions.
“What we try to do is slow the world down for them, just a little bit,” Kannally said. “We give them strategies to think before they act.”
Assistant Principal Ryan Ferriman has observed bullying can also come from innocent circumstances that end disastrously; of a child simply learning what’s socially acceptable. He said a student making a simple observation about someone could lead to unintentionally hurting feelings and could lead down the path of bullying.
“Kids this age, especially fifth graders, are brutally honest,” Ferriman said. “They’ll make an observation that is hurtful but they weren’t intending to harm.”
Ferriman said Creekview’s students are at an age where they’re learning what is socially acceptable like they would with a math or English class.
Kannally said his frame of reference for what problems he sees among students stays within the realm of fifth and sixth grade. He said the school communicates with other schools and how problems among high schoolers are “tougher to navigate.”
For places like the Early College High School (ECHS), Principal Ken Chaffin said, though he’s new, he hasn’t seen much bullying going on.
Chaffin said it’s hard to ensure all students respect each other at any grade level, but officials are “aware of students who don’t get along.”
“Helping students understand the greater value in each other and conveying value to each other is a challenge also,” Chaffin said. “For as many negative interactions, there are exponentially more positive actions we see.”
He said the school works to give students the skills to coexist. He said he’s seen many families in the community who are willing to partner with staff to make sure students learn to get along.
Though Chaffin has seen the rise in technology use among students be a positive force, he’s also seen it be used for harassment.
He said staff members are routinely educated on detecting harassment on social media. He said there is a way to report harassment students are encouraged to use that serves as “another safety net” for them.
Like Creekview though, he said his students are learning to be more savvy with their use of technology so they don’t make those social mistakes and become “good digital citizens.”
“I believe this is true in any school, in that there are so many people who care deeply about kids, and we’re going to try to do everything we can to equip them, and also for school to be a safe place,” Chaffin said. “It is going to be a moving target, if I had to guess, and it will continue to be as you see more… social media challenges arise.”
Ferriman said Creekview’s students are at an age where social media use is at a high point, and social mistakes are easier to make on those platforms.
He also said it’s a problem among students where if a harassment problem or a mistake is made online, it’s hard to “unplug” from the problem when the student leaves school because their mistakes follow them all the time.
Chaffin echoed Ferriman’s sentiment, and said it’s also hard for any student to break away from the stress of making a mistake online and the bullying that follows it.
Both schools agree on how technology has made opportunities for problems to arise, but the value of those technologies for education creates opportunities to teach students how to avoid them for the future.