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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.