LET'S MAKE OUR SCHOOLS SAFE FOR CHILDREN

By Bart Body

Safety in the schools has many aspects. Adults must be sensitive to issues of verbal and physical bullying and harassment.

Columbine and Santee, and a dozen other school shootings and knifings, have demonstrated the importance of the social environment. Bullying, for example, is a very common phenomenon in elementary schools. Consider these brief quotes from the APA Monitor, summarizing the recent research.

"Adults within the school environment dramatically overestimate their effectiveness in identifying and intervening in bullying situations."

"The most effective strategies to stop bullying involve the entire school as a community to change the climate of the school and the norms of behavior. "

"In the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program, school staff introduce and implement the program, to improve peer relations and make the school a safe and pleasant environment. To avoid "reinventing the wheel," the National Bullying Prevention Campaign plans to disseminate information about successful programs such as Olweus's, which was named a "blueprint" program by the University of Colorado's Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence."

Does it happen here in Cardiff? Yes, it happens a lot! If you do not think that bullying is a problem here, please ask your child, your grandchild, or the neighbor kids, about name-calling, teasing, shoving and outright slugging and beating. The really unfortunate thing is that the administration pretends it does not exist here. They choose not to see it.

What is to be done? Discipline is important, but it is only after the fact -- like bailing water from the boat when you really need to plug the leak. You need to change the social environment. There must be a clear code of conduct, clearly communicated and consistently enforced. Staff must be sensitive to issues of bullying and potential violence, and vigilant for any direct or indirect evidence of harassment. Most important, you need to generate a sense of community within the school.

A sense of community looks like this: The school culture is positive, accepting, and supportive, rather than angry, resentful, narrowly exclusive, competitive, and self-centered. Children and adults are respectful and considerate of each other because they see each other primarily as partners and helpers and friends, rather than as competitors and taskmasters and threats.

How do you create such a sense of community? You first create the vision. To make it specific requires a series of well-conceived presentations, videos, special events, skits, posters, competitions, and so on. Then, you make it real, with small-group experiences and workshops, where students get a sense of how it feels to relate to each other as true friends. To keep it going, deviations from the goal are promptly and effectively corrected. This includes enforcing the rules and implementing specific programs like peer counseling, anger management, and so on.