Kids pulled from school over anti-bullying exercise

MANCHESTER — The father of a Hallsville School fourth-grader wants the principal reprimanded, or fired, for allowing an anti-bullying exercise that asked students to curse in class.

Keith Katsikis said he and his wife have pulled their three Hallsville students out of the school after they found out about the exercise he believes is inappropriate for children.

Katsikas has started a petition calling for the firing of Hallsville principal Christi Michaud.

He also sent copies of his letter to the school superintendent, school board members, the mayor, aldermen and the woman who presented the exercise.

Katsikas said he found out about the exercise when he and his wife picked their children up from school Wednesday, as they do every day, and his son told them: “Something really weird happened.”

Katsikas said his son told him that a woman entered the classroom to teach a lesson on bullying. She taped a life-size paper man on the wall and passed out small pieces of paper for students to write vulgarities like several four-letter words and derogatory terms towards certain groups. The word or phrase had to be something that someone has said to them in the past. She collected the papers and mixed them up in a basket and then had children read the word or phrase, so the class could hear them.

Katsikas said the words were vulgarities and his son recalled Evans saying: “Say it like you mean it.” Katsikas said many children protested reading the words, so she allowed them to pick a different word, but they had to participate. She also had them rip a piece off the figure.

When all the children had finished, and only the head of the figure remained, the children had to tape their piece of the figure back in place and apologize.

Katsikas’ son told him Evans said the moral was: “When you swear at someone, that person can never be put back together again.”

Katsikas said his wife went online and found an exercise on the Education World website, addressing the issue of a new classmate trying to fit in that calls for children to say something “mean” before tearing off a piece of the figure. After the children apologize and tape the pieces back in place, the website says: “But it doesn’t look the same and the message is that ‘scars remain ... chances are they will never go away.’”

Katsikas said: “Even if the lesson was given as described in this plan, it is awful.”

After hearing what had happened in his son’s class, Katsikas said he entered the school and wanted to speak with Michaud. She was busy, so he spoke with assistant principal Patricia Auger and when he explained what had happened, he said: “She was physically sickened.”

Katsikas and his wife have been invited to meet Monday morning with School Superintendent Debra Livingston, Michaud and other parties involved, as well as Ward 7 school board member Ross Terrio.

Katsikas said he wants to make sure principals “are mandated to send home notices when something like this happens.”

Since he’s planning on home schooling his children, he said he’s pursuing the parental notification issue for the benefit of the children who remain in the public schools. His philosophy is: “Let them live and learn at a child’s pace.” Katsikis said his opinion is that the Manchester schools are: “A little too risky for my children.”

Whatever happened to standing your ground and punching the bully in the nose?

Nothing, in my opinion. When I teach anti-bullying in my school, I tell kids quite explicitly that they have every right to defend themselves, and we have rules in place that make it clear that self defence is allowed - unlike a lot of schools unfortunately.

Why teach our kids to grow up to be candy-assed sissies?

I certainly don't want to teach that to kids - but these types of programs aren't about that. This program is directed at stopping the bullies from bullying - not stopping the targets from responding.

There's nothing manly about hurting the weak. Exactly the opposite in fact.

Ok, let me see if I understand the “logic” behind this attempt to reduce bullying. If a kid can swear the bully will run away?

I'll explain the logic because it does exist. This type of program is used in schools all over the world and has proven efficacy in dealing with bullying.

The teacher first of all gets students to write down examples of real insults and verbal attacks, they have heard in their own school and community. The idea is simple - to use the language the kids are hearing and may well be using themselves in these types of situations. There's a few reasons for doing it this way - a couple of them are to avoid turning the class into something that is treated as a joke, by using sanitised and outdated terms (like 'sissy' or 'wimp' or 'nerd') that kids will regard as stupid and silly and showing that the teacher is so completely out of touch that they are not worth listening to; and because some of the terms that are being used in many places are offensive enough that only the most teacher imaginable would give a list of them to a group of students - you get the students to make the list so you are dealing with what they experience and say. If it's a community where kids don't swear and curse (and there are hopefully still communities like that) the lists the kids come up with won't contain curse words. If the lists do contain such words, it's because those are the words the kids are using.

The lists can also be useful in telling the teacher what problems exist in their community - if the lists of "insults" include the words 'bible bitch', it might be an indication that there's specific bullying of Christian students occurring (and it does happen), just as one example.

So once you have the lists what is done with them. In essence the program gets kids to use these authentic insults on a paper model, and uses the model to send two messages. One that words and insults can hurt people, and two that just saying you are sorry afterwards doesn't undo the damage. In a society where large amounts of children are being taught that their misbehaviour doesn't have consequences, and where the typical response of parents to much misbehaviour is based around fluffy ideas like "Tell Sarah you're sorry and give her a hug," explaining that that isn't a solution is necessary in many cases. Schools typically have a lot less power to discipline and punish children than their parents do - and when parents only ever take the warm and fluffy approaches, schools need to develop programs based around that, whether they want to or not. You have to do what works.

This type of program doesn't work with serious bullying - the type where the bully enjoys what they are doing and does it because they enjoy it. It does often work with the more minor and common forms of bullying where the kids who are doing it, aren't that bad, and once they understand it is hurting somebody and isn't just a big joke, are less likely to do it. It doesn't solve all the problems - but it can solve a decent chunk of them.

Schools and teachers do a lot of dumb things and there are a lot of programs in schools that are, frankly, stupid and wrongheaded. But not everything is, and sometimes a program may be a lot more sophisticated than it looks like superficially. The media isn't going to explain a program in detail. It's going to talk about a small feature of it. That is what is happening here.

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