By Katrina Grant
Many schools around the country are starting to deal more intensively with the issue of bullying. At Seneca High School, a program has been put together to deal with this issue and to help get younger students in the district involved. L.I.V.E., Leaders in Violence Education, was part of the district’s initiative for the statewide Week of Respect.
“I started this program five years ago at Seneca because my brother was being bullied at school,” Jaclyn Cerutti, History teacher at Seneca High School, said. “I felt powerless, and it made me nauseous to know when he was going to school that he was being bullied.”
Cerutti created a mentor program with the high school students and the middle school students for teens being bullied or witnessing other students being bullied.
“This grew beyond my expectations,” Cerutti said. “The kids have been very passionate about this.”
Over the past year-and-a-half the program has grown in its success, and more schools and faculty members have become involved.
“In the past year-and-a-half this has become very successful,” Cerutti said. “We have been getting the middle schools to come over to the high school to organize the workshops. There have been some growing pains along the way with logistics and finding the right person, but now things are starting to work out.”
Among some of the activities the program is organizing and taking part in are wall murals in the school and national pledges. The program has also participated in the Redefining Beautiful project, where teachers and students don’t wear makeup for a week.
“We have wall murals in our school that have four different P.S.A. topics on them,” Cerutti said. “We deal with things such as dating violence, violence against yourself, self-esteem issues and use popular television shows as examples. We also put up pictures of teachers and their kids and have things like ‘would you bully me’ or ‘when I’m bullying someone, I’m bullying someone else’s child.’ We are also doing Megan’s Pledge, which is a national pledge for Megan Meier and more than 600 students have done the Anderson Cooper pledge.”
One of the main parts of the initiative is the mentoring program. The high school students take part in mentoring middle school students, to start instilling anti-bullying and other issues in them earlier than high school.
“This has been a blessing in a way and very exciting,” Cerutti said. “It has been frustrating because, for five years, I’ve been saying this. But I appreciate it, and I’m excited for the kids. Some of them have graduated without seeing the mentor program take off. They will get to see their hard work come to fruition.”
