As schools have tried to do more to prevent bullying, some organizations are offering programs to help.
Gwinnett County resident Jimmy Shafe is part of a group that has created an anti-bullying program called H.E.A.R. that was tested earlier this year at Gwinnett’s Sweetwater Middle School and other schools across the country.
H.E.A.R., Helping Everyone Achieve Respect, attempts to differentiate itself from other anti-bullying efforts by working with students in small groups. The program includes a 50-minute interactive classroom presentation, a 16-page student workbook, and a training manual. Shafe’s group has worked with the National Guard to make presentations to students in 46 states. Their goal is to work with more students.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently interviewed Shafe, owner of Career Training Concepts, and Amy Smith, director of educational programs, to find out more about their work and what makes their program different than other anti-bullying efforts. Below are excerpts from the interview. Some responses were edited for brevity.
Q: How did this idea come about?
Shafe: "I grew up in Central Africa as a missionary kid … One of the things that we're involved in is we started a school for single mothers (in Central Africa) that, for the most part, most of them were rape victims. We started a 12-month school to try to help them recover their self-respect and dignity and have a trade … I look at that as the ultimate in bullying and seeing it in the ultimate form of just how cruel and badly aggressive behavior hurts someone, and from that we started to look around locally and say 'We may not be at that intense level, but we can make a difference here.' "
Q: What were some of the biggest challenges you all saw (in the Sweetwater Middle School training)?
Smith: "I know that a lot of them come to school with quite a bit of baggage and I'm quite sensitive to that. So the workshop is semi-structured, so we don't invite them to tell personal stories. We really facilitate the discussion around case studies and things like that. But I'm very aware and some of the educators in these pilots have told me the students are coming to school with things that no child should have to experience."
Q: There’s a popular national initiative to improve classroom behavior called Positive Behavioral Intervention and Supports. I was wondering is that pretty similar to what you all are doing or are there differences between the two?
Smith: "They're trying to teach students what to do instead of punishing them for what they do wrong and that's exactly what we're doing … We're giving students information about the forms of bullying and its consequences."
Q: Since you have done the training at Sweetwater Middle, what type of feedback have you received? Have there been fewer incidents there?
Shafe: "Eighty-nine percent (of students) said the presentation influenced my commitment to respecting and including others. Now, once we walk out the door, will they respect the next kid they encounter? We don't know. But if 89 percent of them at the next time they took the survey say they will, I guarantee we're going to get some impact."
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