In what sounds like very wise advice, Jurgensen and her fellow administrators told these student activists, “You have to live it. You have to teach it.” The high school students knew younger students looked up to them but now they were becoming role models. “In an October retreat the council identified types of bullying – physical, verbal, cyber – as well as social alienation and intimidation. It came up with a three-point pledge: be strong, stand up, use your voice.”
They were teaching and modeling resilience, standing up for oneself and a community’s norms, and being good to people – knowing they had a kind of credibility with younger students that the adults at school didn’t have.“Success is evident,” the Gazette reported.
One of the student council members told The Gazette that she learns more about what works every time she visits an elementary classroom. That’s a good teacher, eh?
As for what motivated student activist Torin Hovander in Albuquerque, N.M., “a few of my friends and I decided that we didn’t like what was going on in not just our school but in schools all across the country,” he e-mailed me. So Torin, a senior, and his friends started a bullying prevention and awareness-raising club at his high school last September.
