About SSA: SSA In The News

RLS Students Learn How to Fight Bullying

May 17, 2007
by Jesse Duarte

An overweight middle-school student sits silently in a chair, reading a large science book. Several students approach him, tease him about his weight, and sarcastically tell him he’s their best friend. The humiliated student remains silent.

This type of situation plays out in schoolyards across the world, but this particular one was just a skit performed as part of the Safe Schools Ambassadors program, which last week gave 32 RLS (Robert Louis Stevenson) Middle School sixth- and seventh-graders a crash course in how to recognize bullying and fight it.

The SSA program, run through Community Matters and administered by Sally Clapper, worked with RLS students who were nominated by their peers and teachers as being notable leaders with “social capital” — in other words, the popular kids.

During a two-day training, those students are turned into Safe Schools Ambassadors: they’re given the tools to recognize mistreatment and decide what to do about it. Interventions can be as bold as telling a bully to stop, as non-confrontational as telling a responsible adult about the problem, or as easy as approaching bullied students after the confrontation and talking to them.

Last Friday’s skit ended with a Safe Schools Ambassador admonishing the bullies about their behavior, and asking the bullied kid if he watched “American Idol” last night.

“These are the students who stay really quiet and isolate themselves,” Clapper told the RLS ambassadors. Often their isolation leads them to resort to drastic solutions, such as one middle school student who recently jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, Clapper said.

“If each one of you, or even 10 of you in this room, on a daily basis, just looked a person in the eye and talked to them — ‘Hey, how’s it going? What are you reading? Cool, catch you later’ — and then kept walking, it would make a difference. It could even save a life,” he added.

Clapper went on to show the 32 students how if each of them intervened in four such incidents every school day, 25,600 positive actions could result.

On the first day of the training, students formed teams and learned about five types of mistreatment: exclusion, put-downs, bullying, physical mistreatment and vandalism against campus property. On the second day, they shared stories about acts of bullying they’ve witnessed, and performed skits depicting typical problems that occur on campus and how an ambassador can intervene.

Sara Cakebread, who is now the executive director of the St. Helena Family Resource Center, brought the SSA program to the district’s attention last year. It has been implemented in more than 600 schools in America and Canada, including in Napa and Calistoga.

To ensure that the training stays with the students, they will continue to meet in their small groups to discuss their progress and support each other. Clapper will return to RLS and meet with the same students later this spring, as well as this fall.