It is the stuff of childhood and after school specials legend – bullies stealing milk money.
Bullying has been targeted recently by educators as a major threat to students performing well in school, and Amelia Middle School recently kicked off an effort to do something about it.
A new anti-bullying program developed in Norway has been put into practice at Amelia Middle School, said student counselor Robin Becker, in the hopes of drastically reducing bullying over the next couple of years.
“The program itself is called the ‘Olweus Bully Prevention Program,'” said Becker. “It’s a very comprehensive program that includes components for school-wide, community-wide and classroom-wide intervention that we can put into place to help decrease bullying in our school. School-wise what we’ve done is put some rules into place so the students will know we won’t tolerate bullying. Also, we did a survey in September to find out where our hotspots are and where most of the bullying occurs in our school. Will will increase supervision in those spots. We use positive and negative responses with our kids, and we did our kick off last week to let the kids know.”