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Where would you send your child - Camp Arowhon or St. Brother Andre Catholic School?
Joanne Kates had an interesting article in yesterday’s Globe and Mail. Ms Kates is the director of Camp Arowhon, a children’s summer camp in Algonquin Park. As she explains, she was appalled at the amount of bullying that had developed at the camp during the years between her idyllic summers there as a child and her return as the camp’s director in 1989. And so she set out to do something about all the bullying - with sensitivity sessions, vigilance, workshops, interventions, and a lot of diligence and hard work. Things are not perfect at the camp in terms of bullying these days, but they are far better, so much so that a research report on the camp found that “eighty per cent of campers reported standing up for a victimized peer the last time they witnessed bullying. This is a very high rate of intervention, as compared to observational studies conducted on school playgrounds, as well as other survey-based studies, which have found that only 17 to 25 per cent of peers intervened during a bullying episode.”
A diametrically-opposed approach is being tried out at St. Brother André Catholic School in Markham, ON. Here the principal thinks that the best way to deal with bullies is to accommodate them and to ask their victims to forgive their tormentor’s behaviour. As this newspaper report shows, Fraser Sutherland - who has suffered three concussions at the hands of one particular tormentor - is now afraid to go to school, fearing that the educators at the school won’t protect him from the bully. The principal, however, thinks that the bully has reformed. He kindly suggests that Fraser just suck it up.
So, gentle readers, I would be very interested in your opinions as to which approach is likely to yield the best results: Door #1 (Camp Arowhon) or Door #2 (St. Brother André Catholic School) by recording your vote in the comments section of this blog. If we get enough votes, I will forward the results to the camp director and the school principal.
Door number one - is the best approach
“There are no magic pills to make everyone get along. But bullying thrives on silence. When we help kids talk about what’s broken in their relationships, they tend to figure out how to fix it.”
Bullying thrives on silence of the adults, especially in the schools. Funny how the very same adults within a school, ignores the students who are alone in the playground, or ignore the changes in face gestures as the students go through the doors to begin another day at school. Hard to miss, the anxious faces filled with stress, and even harder to miss the tell-tale signs of poor student work. The students have to suck it up, “Has nothing changed? This harrowing bullying tale dates back to elementary school, with Fraser saying one classmate has continually teased and harassed him about his weight and his solitary nature. But it took a dangerous turn in February 2009, when he says he was lured to the top of a hill during their Grade 7 ski trip and pushed down an embankment.”
Apparently not, even though lots of new policies with increases in funding, the same type of bullying continues, and crosses over to the physical bullying, when bullies have never been stopped. In my corner of the world, parents are the first ones to call in the police, bypassing the school. Principals hate having their authority challenge, and the odds are pretty good that the bully student will be the one that is evicted from the school, and the bully’s parents told to home school, and if not, to another school, with the police reports following the student to the next school. Of course, down in my corner of the world, the police have considerable more time in dealing with bullying and other things, since not a lot of crime is on the go. The youth justice system, also has the time to go after youth like the bully that is making Fraser Sutherland’s a living hell.
Imagine if parents in Toronto and the surrounding area, send in the police first to the schools, rather than dealing with the protocols and their silly bully policies. No doubt, if police were send in for the milder events of bullying, even though the kid or a group of kids,was only 8 years old - the school policies of bullying would be change overnight, and the adults within the school would no longer be silent about bullying.
It works great even for bullying off the school grounds and especially the physical type of bullying. My youngest child was being picked on by a certain gang of children, and nothing work until I called the police to look after it. Priceless because after the police left the kids’ home, the parents phone me up, how dare I phone up the police, for a little scratch and bump on my child’s forehead, omitting the other events that took place in the last 3 years. Events, that I personally contacted the parents of the kids, in the attempt to stopped the bullying, to no avail. I quietly said, without a hint of anger, I warn you, what I would do, if my child was bullied by your kid. I carried out my threats, and next time around, charges will be laid since your kid will be of the age that police can actually laid charges. Suffice to say, from that moment, my kid was never bothered by this gang of kids, and bullying behaviour was finally stopped. In fact one of the gang is now a good friend with my child, and whole-heartily approves of what I did as a parent. What lied underneath the bullying, was envy over my child’s busy summer schedule of sports, and activities and she could swim and dive off the deep end.
So very true - “The “bully” often has no idea how hurtful they were being. Sometimes there’s a history driving mean behaviour, and when that hurt gets voiced it’s defused, like a bomb that loses its detonator. Sometimes bullying is a power grab, and bringing it out in the open yields better behaviour, perhaps because if that child talks about their vulnerability, they feel less compelled to make someone else feel small.”
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/parenting/battling-the-bullies-how-i-helped-curb-bullying-at-my-childhood-camp/article4377974/