'Everyone was mean to everyone'
Schools create anti-bullying plans to address problems in classrooms, online
Evan Kiyoshi French
Northern News Services
Friday, August 21, 2015
SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
Shiri MacPherson remembers being in a class with a boy who missed school for an entire year because he was being bullied by other students.
The 14-year-old Sir John Franklin High School student said she was in middle school at William McDonald School when the boy stopped coming to class.
The other students taunted the boy for being "weird and smelly," she said.
MacPherson said since moving to high school the bullying problems have eased.
But, in middle school, things were different.
"Everyone was mean to everyone," said MacPherson. "In Grade 6, we even had to have a class sharing-circle, and everyone was crying. It was quite dramatic."
Cyberbullying is also a problem she's witnessed.
"It's happened a few times I've heard, that people make social media pages about other people," she said. "They just post a bunch of hateful things about them."
Cyberbullying causes chaos in the school populations because it's often unclear who posted it, said MacPherson.
"A lot of people try to guess who it is," she said. "And everyone turns their backs on each other."
Tyler Minkoff, 14, who also attended William McDonald Middle School last year, said he remembers anti-bullying conversations in class. He said the conversations seem to have worked since the result was a drop in bullying.
"No one really got bullied," he said. "Teachers handled it very well."
Bullying fell in the sights of the GNWT in 2013, when Education Minister Jackson Lafferty told the legislative assembly the Department of Education, Culture and Employment intended to tackle the issue with its Safe Schools Initiative.
This year, the department offered up to $10,000 in funding to each NWT school for anti-bullying programming and required each district to come out with anti-bullying plans.
Tami Johnson, spokesperson for ECE, said 13 territory schools successfully applied.
Claudia Parker, superintendent for Yellowknife Catholic Schools (YCS), said St. Joseph School, which teaches kindergarten to Grade 8 students, was the big winner in applying for the anti-bullying money, taking away the full $10,000. St. Patrick High School and Weledeh School each pocketed $7,000 for their anti-bullying programming.
"I don't think there's any big difference," she said. "It's always been that we've had to take care of our students and have their safety in mind. There's just a larger focus around the bullying that's taking place now in the schools. There's more educating around that topic for the students."
Students are taught what bullying looks like, what it means to be a bully and what bystanders should do in the event they witness bullying, said Parker.
The students are taught about the harm caused by cyberbullying, which is particularly difficult to handle because it happens away from teacher supervision, said Parker.
Parker said students at St. Joseph School put on a show to prove what they'd learned, in June - called the ESJS Bullying Games - which featured all the classes of the school and was presented in the school's gymnasium.
Parker said administrators hope to convince students bullying isn't worthwhile, although, she said, they don't expect to eliminate it altogether.
"That would be ideal," she said. "We'll never stomp it out 100 per cent but we hope to put an environment in place for all of our students."
Anita Griffore, supervisor of instruction for Yellowknife Education District No. 1 (Ykl), said the public schools applied for the funding on their own, so she doesn't have data showing how much each school received from ECE for the one-time anti-bullying funding.
She said she's aware that Mildred Hall School ran a program called the peace-maker project, which addressed the bullying problem.
Jeff Seabrook, principal at William MacDonald School, said bullying typically becomes a problem around the middle school age - between 10 and 14 years of age. Seabrook is new at the middle school, having recently taken over as the top administrator, but he's aware teachers are working with students on the subject.
He said the whole student population will be considering the topic again on Sept. 4.
They'll spend a half-day working on team-building and co-operation activities aimed at getting them working together, he said.
