10A COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL NOVEMBER 15, 2017
LMS tries to stem increase in bullying
New program looks to open conversations
By Caitlyn May
cmay@cgsentinel.com
There’s a stack of papers in
Emily Wren’s desk. She hasn’t
fi nished going through them yet.
They’ve been fi lled out by
students at Lincoln Middle
School and each one offers a
new bit of heartbreak.
“When you call me dumb, it
makes me feel like I am noth-
ing.”
It’s an answer to a prompt
printed on each piece of paper:
When you call me _____, it
makes me feel _____. There are
520 students enrolled in Lincoln
and the stack on Wren’s desk
is easily compromised of 500
sheets.
“Only two kids so far, hav-
en’t taken it seriously,” Wren,
who's vice principal at Lincoln
said, fl ipping through the stack
of papers she’s begun sorting
into three separate piles; used,
not used and still to be gone
through.
It’s all part of the “Choose a
Different Word” campaign at
Lincoln, a program meant to
stem bullying within the school
and give students an outlet. The
prompts will be scrubbed of
identifying language and placed
around the school while leader-
ship students have utilized the
information to create posters
to hang in hallways. The deco-
rations though, are a baby step
in a road littered with outside,
complicating factors.
“Verbal referrals accounted
for 22 percent of the referrals,”
Wren said. “Now, three months
in, they’re at 44 percent.”
Something has changed in the
last year.
Students who are caught ver-
bally harassing their classmates
are given a referral and sent to
the Tiger Pride Room—a space
dedicated to restorative con-
versations. Essentially, bullies
are placed in a room with their
victims and walked through a
conversation with a mediator to
come to a better understanding
of their actions, consequences
and forge a line of communica-
tion between the two parties.
Of the fi ve leadership stu-
dents sitting on Wren’s couch,
excused from class to partake
in a discussion about the cam-
paign, three say the Tiger Pride
room works. Two, disagree.
“Of course it doesn’t work,”
Nancy Willard has spent the last
fi ve years studying bullying and
possible approaches schools
can take to better address the
issue. She’s worked in the Sa-
lem-Keizer district and is work-
ing on material that can utilized
around the state.
“The restorative process
doesn’t work for this situation,”
she said. “This school is leaps
and bounds ahead because they
are trying. But it won’t work. It
will get worse.”
The current process, accord-
ing to Willard, allows the stu-
dent with an advanced social
standing to maintain that stand-
ing. “They know exactly what
to say during the conversation,”
she said.
According to Wren, students
who harass other students know
when to act as well. “We can
correct it when we catch it,”
she said. “But the last prompt
says ‘I wish my teachers knew
‘blank’ and they say that they
wished we knew bullies are
sneaky,” she said.
Insults being fl ung around
Lincoln, according to student
prompts include unfortunate-
ly standard pejoratives such as
“prostitute” and “whore.” But
newer insults have emerged in-
cluding, “Go back to Mexico”
and “Go home.”
“They hear it on the news,
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So, while students’ parents
are also contacted in addition to
referrals, it’s not always a solu-
tion.
The next step, according to
Wren, is to teach kids how to
stand up to bullies. As a self-de-
scribed former ‘mean girl,’
Wren said she can relate to the
students who stand by and do
nothing.
“My friends would say hor-
rible things and I would laugh
because it was easier and saf-
er than standing up,” she said.
She also noted that students are
being made aware of the re-
al-world consequences of their
actions. “We’re letting them
know, if these things happened
in their workplace, they would
be fi red,” she said.
“It sounds like they’re (Lin-
coln Middle School) doing the
best they can and they need to
be recognized for that,” Willard
said. “What schools nationwide
are doing is not working. This is
not the fault of educators. What
they have been told about bul-
lying is inaccurate and the way
they have been told to try to
handle these situations will nev-
er be effective.”
Cottage Grove
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Cottage-Grove-Sentinel
Nearly 1,000 students from South Lane School District were treated to a day at the theatre thanks to a
snowball effect that started at Lincoln Middle School.
A raffl e earned the attention of a student's father who reached out to Lincoln's vice principal, Emily Wren.
"I think he'd like to stay anonymous," she said, but noted he offered the students a chance to see a ballet
performance at the Hult Center on Halloween. Quickly, the offer moved from Lincoln to a district-wide
invite. "We had kids in costumes because it was Halloween and it was great," Wren said. "Two ushers,
after the performance said our kids were so well behaved."
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