Sweet Home Junior High students spent last week in activities aimed at reducing bullying, teasing and harassment.
During Prevention Week, they heard from speaker Jeff Yalden, performed skits and made posters, all oriented toward reducing aggressive behavior.
“The whole district has school rules around ‘be safe, be responsible and be respectful,'” Prevention and Safety Coordinator Kristin Adams said. “What I tried to do was look at the school rules and what this meant to each of the schools.”
When she was hired for the position, funded through a federal grant through next year, Adams started reviewing data on drug use and aggressive behavior. Afterward, she wanted to focus on positives and creating a positive environment to decrease aggressive behavior.
The students heard from Yalden, a motivational speaker, on Tuesday. He talked about the four T’s, “take time to think,” and choosing friends wisely.
He stressed that persons should think about the consequences of their choices before they make the choices,.
“You choose the behavior,” Adams said quoting a TV psychologist. “You choose the consequences.”
She tries to impress on students that if they “choose wisely, things will work out.”
One of Adams’ favorite quotes on the choosing friends is that “if you swim with sharks, you’re going to get eaten.”
When she grew up in Sweet Home, Adams said, it was different than now. Often, students would leave, but they would come back and work in the community after school or some time doing something else.
They would come back and continue to make the community better, Adams said. The economy has changed, and that’s affected student attitudes, toward their community, for example.
“The kids are seeing their parents laid off left and right,” Adams said. “They see Sweet Home as a dead end because they feel they’re not going to amount to anything.”
Yalden brought a message of hope for the students, that if they made the right choices, they will succeed no matter what the challenges.
Yalden gave two workshops. One was one character building. About 70 students, who will be part of the “Welcome Everybody” (WEB) program next year, participated in charting the virtues they think are important. Next year, those WEB students will help incoming seventh-grade students adjust to junior high.
Another workshop was aimed at students who might make excellent leaders but who for some reason have not lived up to that potential. He talked with those students about goal setting and what they would like to do with their lives.
He shared his own story, how he was among the lowest achievers in his class with low self-esteem and a low self-image. By making the right choices, he explained how he got where he was.
Yalden graduated 128th out of 133 students. He scored 610 on his SATs. He was rejected by 16 of 19 colleges where he applied.
Since then, he was named Mr. New Hampshire Male America and later Mr. Male America’s Mr. Personality. He served four years in the Marines and was a two-time Marine of the Year.
He is now one of only 300 “certified speaking professionals” in the world. He also is a contributing author to best sellers, including “A Cup of Chicken Soup for the Soul” and “Lead Now or Step Aside.” He is the author of “Keep it Simple.”
Yalden was the highlight of the week, “getting people to stop and think,” Adams said. Other activities included special curriculum for teachers to concentrate on school rules and “stop the violence.”
Beyond that, students at the junior high and elementary schools held a poster contest about attitude, “the little thing that makes a big difference.”
Junior high students also had an essay contest on what they personally can do to stop the violence at school.
Skits at a junior high assembly on Thursday and class work covered bullying, respect, teasing, exclusion and harassment. On Friday, they talked in classes about tolerance of others and accepting diversity.
“What does it mean to respect diversity? What are alternate ways to respond to someone who does or says something because you’re not like them?” Adams said. Those are the questions the curriculum explored.
The big word around the junior high is “gay,” Adams said. Students teasing each other will say things like “that’s so gay” or “you’re so gay.”
In one exercise, the students were asked to come up with an alternative to the word, Adams said. She was still waiting for responses at the end of the week and had no idea what the students might come up with.