LAGO VISTA—Laven Low, a seventh grader at Lago Vista Middle School, said she pays more attention to how her friends and peers talk to each other than she did two years ago.
“Before, we didn’t really care,” she said of the way students tease each other. “We didn’t really think about what our friends thought of it.”
Last year, she joined the Safe School Ambassadors program, which teaches students to stand up for each other. The program is a way to curb bullying and other undesirable behavior at the ground level.
J.T. Buckley joined the program this year, and said he has noticed a change in the campus.
“A lot more fighting happened last year, it seems like, than this year,” he said.
LVMS started the program to give students a bigger role in improving the environment on campus.
“It gives them some ownership,” Gina Carmichael, school nurse and administrator of the program, said. “No one really takes (middle school students) seriously. No one really asks them to step up and do the hard thing. They wait until they are in high school to do that.”
In the first year of the program, Carmichael said there wasn’t a big change in the atmosphere of the school, but that was to be expected. She said other schools that implemented the program had warned her that it takes a year or two before it becomes effective.
“People were really excited to learn it, but then they realized how hard it is to follow through,” she said. “That’s a hard thing to ask these kids to do at this age.”
Jennifer O’Donnell, senior program and media coordinator for the national Safe Schools Ambassador program said it takes about three years for a program to take root.
“Definitely we say the first year is about implementation,” she said.
Now the program is in its second year, Carmichael said she has noticed a change in the atmosphere at the school, and she is seeing more students taking action.
“The kids are getting a little bit more confident in trying these skills,” she said. “There is a rhythm to it. Kids are finding the flow to it and how it all fits together.”
O’Donnell said once the program starts to become part of a school’s culture, students start to be nicer to each other as a matter of course.
“They’ll start to see a shift in social norms on the campus,” she said. “Students start feeling more empowered, like the school is theirs too.”
Students in the program are taught how to redirect fellow students who are bullying or vandalizing property. They learn techniques that allow them to step in and defend a student who is being picked on and diffuse a situation before it escalates. Most importantly, they learn how to gauge when a situation is beyond their control.
LVMS Principal Trisha Upchurch said though it is her first year at Lago Vista, she does see a difference between the students here and at previous schools she worked in.
“It’s middle school, very few people make it out without being teased,” she said, but adding it is less severe at LVMS. “Because there is heightened awareness, there’s more reports, but they’re not as serious.”
Upchurch said she did not want to create an environment where students are constantly tattling on each other. The ambassadors program helps students resolve issues on their own without creating a mistrustful environment.
“It’s developing some leadership potential in some of these kids,” she said. “This is giving them a chance to be a positive role model.”
Denna Jones, a teacher involved in the program, said the most difficult part of the program is getting students to take a hard look at their closest friends. She said it’s easier for them to step up and intervene when there is a big problem, but evaluating the smaller interactions between friends is more difficult.
“On our campus, there’s not a whole lot of kicking and shoving,” she said. “The way that they talk to each other and dig at each other — even though it’s facetious and sarcastic — you don’t know what the other kid’s going through at home.”
Laven said she is learning when playful teasing among friends is crossing a line.
“When it gets too far, that’s when you need to step in,” she said.
J.T. said he notices when the conversation escalates from a simple joke to an argument.
“If the person tries to fight back, it just goes back and forth with getting worse and worse,” he said.
Jones said the key to making the program work is getting a variety of students involved. She said ambassadors should come from a variety of backgrounds, participate in different activities and hang out with different groups.
“You aim for kids from all different walks of life,” she said.
Carmichael said there are 63 students involved this year, and when combined with the students who participated last year, “we’ve got about 80 kids in the building who have had this training.” There are approximately 300 total students on campus.
That kind of participation means the program will have a greater impact than the administration can measure.
“A lot of what they’re changing are things we never would have seen or never heard about,” she said. “Things feel calmer this year.”