Pink Shirt Day a golden opportunity
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Two weeks ago, just before March break, the Safe Schools Team at Our Lady of Fatima held Pink Shirt Day, a day with activities to get students thinking on how they could help prevent bullying at their school.
As the name implies, on pink shirt day every student was encouraged to wear a pink shirt to school to make a visible stand against bullying. Over the week before March Break each class was asked to decorate their classroom doors with anti-bullying decorations.
There were some very creative designs: on the Grade 7/8 door each student from the room traced their hand on paper and then wrote how they could do their part to stand up to bullying. On the Grade 5/6 wall, students took pictures of themselves and their buddies from buddy week and displayed the message ‘Be a buddy’ in many different languages.
In addition to the door decorating, the Safe Schools Team put the buddy traces from the week before up in the hallways to add a festive feel to the day as well as showcasing the combined art of our younger and older students. Just to make the day even more poignant, the Safe Schools Team performed a rehearsed skit in every classroom demonstrating a tense situation involving bullying and urging students not to be a bystander.
Later in the day, we held an assembly and our principal, Mr. Dunnigan, gave a reflective talk on anti-bullying with questions to involve the students. Just like the rest of the day, the talk and the assembly were centered on how we as a school could prevent bullying, with the main message to the students being: ‘don’t be a bystander.’
I was glad to be able to participate in Pink Shirt Day. It was a golden opportunity to think on the effects that bullying has on young people and to participate in measures to prevent bullying in our very own school. Bullying is a very complex problem with no clear answer and each case is different. I would say that it is all the more important to engage young people in anti-bullying education because bullying doesn’t just involve the bully and the victim, it impacts us all.