 Hi my name is Josh. I'm just going to start my story off. It's going to be pretty basic. In grade 7 when I was like the last month and when I actually heard a couple of teachers talking about, I wouldn't make it past grade 8 and that kind of struck me hard because I didn't know I actually, they had doubts in their eyes and I saw that. So when I went to grade 8, I took that 7 years of bullying because it was racial bullying and 7 years that kind of cut you deep. That's just what I tried to deal with. I had a passion to write. I had a passion to speak. That's what I could do, but I was not motivated to do that. Until I went to high school, I was pretty much failing because I was not motivated. I didn't want to learn. I didn't want to do anything. But until the teachers from the aboriginal room, they looked in my file and they saw I could speak and I had a knack to put words and strike visually that they focused on what I could do. They put me in a class that was called English 8. It wasn't just a class that changed my thought. It was the teacher and the support I got. When I went into English, I don't know what happened, but it seemed I was failing from all my grades. It was 14% failing. And when I switched to English, by the end of the year, I had 60% passing. So from 7 years of bullying to just one semester of a class, that can truly make your passion come out and be alive. After I just had a knack for it. I didn't believe that because 7 years of racial bullying, it kind of made you want to leave it alone. And this was truly what made your passions come out and express itself. And yeah, that's, thank you. We're going to just go through a few teachers and staff who will tie everything together, and I'll tie everything together at the end. Thank you, Josh. Thanks again, Josh. My name is Robert Taddy, and I'm the Aboriginal teacher advocate at Frank Hurt. From Josh's words, we can see that there's a whole bunch of things going on, and bullying doesn't happen in isolation. And to deal with bullying as a simple, linear, cause and effect type issue ignores the complexity of that. The experiences that Josh shares, we see that it has to do with academic esteem. It has to do with your self-confidence, your experiences, and all that. So thank you again, Josh, for sharing. Today I'm joined by several students and staff from our school, and we're going to share our story about our endeavors on creating a safe and caring school. Generally, our belief is that a safe and caring school depends on the development and maintenance of meaningful peer and student-adult relationships. Also, the access to programs and clear interventions that build student confidence, skills, and awareness. Through our wraparound approach, we engage administrators, teachers, counselors, educational assistants, youth care workers, and safe school liaisons, among others, in the implementation of a systematic, tiered intervention. Generally speaking, we have school-wide interventions which apply to all our students, and the students whose needs are not being met by those interventions would receive targeted interventions. And finally, individualized interventions are employed to address not just the academics, but the complex social, emotional, academic, and behavioral needs of our students. In this way, our focus is on the whole student and their unique and entire context. Thank you, Mr. Taddy. Hello, my name is Destiny Ferland, and I am a grade 11 student at Frankhurst Secondary. I just want to say it's an honor to be here and to be able to listen to such amazing speakers and be involved in the discussions of Erase Bullying. When I think of a healthy school, the first thing that comes to mind is the teachers and students' relationship. It's important for teachers to get involved and have a well-relationship with their students, talking to them, and meeting them where they are. When teachers are concerned, the best way to communicate with them is to not hover or force them to open up, especially when they may not be ready. Problems take time, and sometimes kids can't always open up so easily. There should always be an equal amount of trust and loyalty with the teacher and student before you pursue any type of counseling process. Teachers need to know their students and let them come to you when they're ready. At Frankhurst Secondary, we offer the Red Cross Program Beyond the Hurt for Anti-Bullying, and our main goal is to get kids to rely on our teachers and counselors for support and helpful feedback. Students from grade 9 to 12 have taken a course to become youth facilitators for our students. Our youth facilitators provide a bridge for students who may feel more comfortable talking to someone who is closer of age or someone they may know, like a friend. Also, located at our Counselor's Office at Frankhurst, we have a suggestion box, which is basically you can put in suggestions if you're a teacher or a parent or a student, or if you are a student and you have an issue or a problem, you can put a note in the box anonymously, and the counselors could bring that up. We provide the students with helpful opinions while also guiding them to a higher source of knowledge and advice, such as the counselors and principals. As youth facilitators, we give the students the confidence and reassurance that they need to consult the counselors with their problems to recognize and end the bullying. Thank you. Hello, my name is Adele Kim. I'm a counselor at Frankhurst Secondary School and one of the adult advisors for the Red Cross Beyond the Hurt youth facilitators. I enjoyed the presentation at lunch today and I'm really excited about it because I've seen how the program has grown in our school and it continues to grow. I briefly want to share a little bit of the history at our school behind this program. It's the third year that Frankhurst has been part of this program and training. The leadership team's goal is to create a culture of care and support through the teachings and presentations. Our youth facilitators have done presentations to grade 7 classes at our associate schools, as well as of course the grade 8 classes at Frankhurst. This year, in addition to the grade 7 and 8 classes, the youth facilitators are quite excited because they've been requested to present to the grade 6 classes as well. Not only do the youth facilitators work with the students, but they are also working on creating awareness for the adults in the school. And parents in the community. At the last parent-teacher interview night, the students set up their own Red Cross anti-bullying station. They showed videos and explained the goals and purpose of the group. The students also provided information about a parent video and guide on how to help fight bullying. They had a wonderful time doing what they were passionate about as they continued their work of spreading the word into our community. Our students also continued to work towards a greater level of awareness in hopes of reaching a bigger audience. Last year, our Red Cross students created three films on anti-bullying. One of the youth-directed films won the honor of the Youth Video of the Year award at Real Youth. This video was also played at the Vancouver International Film Festival. Kayson, the young man sitting in front of me, is one of the students who was part of the group of students in this award-winning video. High school is basically all about having fun and participating in the most that you can and enjoying the experience. But if you don't get involved in the activities that happen at your school, there's not really much experience to enjoy. But that's just from my point of view. Franker and all high schools have enough clubs for people to join regardless of what your interests are. And there's never enough kids in a club or even a sports team. The best way to get involved in the school is helping with organizing school events, pep rallies, barbecues. All these things help you out in getting involved. And the biggest benefit of getting involved in the school is you build relationships with teachers and admin. November 2008, two years into my grade eight year, by that time I got at least four to five... Oh wait, I said that wrong. Yeah. Okay, four to five 90-minute detentions, one in-school suspension, one out-of-school suspension. But I wasn't the only kid who went through this. There was ten of us who got a group created called the Flex 8. And we'd go in the morning with the admin and we'd have a breakfast. And we didn't really care for it. We just thought, okay, it was a reason for us to get more detention in school. But actually it changed me in every way possible. It actually grew on me. And I bonded with someone who I look at as my second mom now, and that was my vice principal at the time. Ms. Christensen, and she got me more involved in everything possible. I'm the only one of two kids left at Frank Hurt, who were in that Flex 8 group, who have not got suspended out of our school or end up on the streets. And now I look out for everyone in my school possible, and I'm in theater and football. And as long as you keep yourself occupied with all these clubs and involvement, you can guarantee one thing and you will be changed and see life and bullying on a different angle and help out. Because as I know, as long as I'm at my school at Frank Hurt, as long as I'm around, I don't like bullying at all, so I'm going to stop as much as I can. Thank you. My name is Natalie Nsang, and along with Destiny and Kason, I go to Frank Hurt and I'm in my senior year at Frank Hurt. I believe that any school, including Frank Hurt, involvement with my students is key to maintain a healthy environment. Like Kason, my years at Frank Hurt consisted of joining many sports teams, taking leadership classes, being a part of the Red Cross, and recently coaching the Grade 8 volleyball team. By being actively involved in these things, I have gained a sense of belonging at Frank Hurt, the confidence to try new things, meet new friends, connect with my teachers, and overall have a voice at my school. I believe that adults at school can help students be more involved by providing a diverse genre of program so that there's something that every student is interested in. Teachers can also spend more time getting to know their students and focus on their strengths other than their weaknesses. This helps students develop confidence in a relationship with their teacher or admin. At Frank Hurt, we have a big student leadership meeting at lunch where any student can come and give input or even create a program they want or are interested in. Having events for new students like Grade 8 pancake breakfast also helps students go welcome and gives them an outlook on what the school is like and what they can do at their time in school. However, just playing sports and joining groups isn't the only thing. It's about stepping up and being a leader or role model when chances are presented. For five days a week, ten months throughout the year, we go to school. And in the halls and classes, we see our classmates every day. We begin to get to know people whether they are a friend or not. After this time, we're able to tell whether a classmate is having a good day or a bad day, but it's up to a person to step up and ask that person how they are doing or even just smile them in the hallway. It's finding that comfort and confidence to help another person. While coaching the Grade 8 volleyball team, a fellow coach and friend of mine shined as a leader and made a positive difference in many Grade 8 girls' lives. One being singing them down and talking about how Frank Hurt, we don't say that so gay after hearing one girl say it. Along with that, she also noticed how one of the girls always complained about being hungry and went up to the principal to tell her what she noticed and asked her if she could follow up on it. But why? Why would she go out of her way to tell her something? She acted on both of these things because she cares deeply about the students at Frank Hurt. She knows that she has a voice at a school that is going to be respected by students and teachers. But overall, it's about taking ownership and taking charge of what happens at school and trying to make a change. Having such role models and leaders like my friend helped to build a strong and healthy school along with students who speak up when they notice something isn't right with another student or any situation. It's an honor to attend Frank Hurt where I not only get my education but a chance to share my voice and an opportunity to make a difference by being a leader and a pros of mobile. Thank you. So I'm going to try to tie things up really quickly. We're not experts at Frank Hurt. Many schools have a lot of the activities that our students have mentioned. We're on a journey to work together to create a safe and scaring school. So I want to just talk a little bit about a few of the things that I think are important. We are collectively as a school, students and staff and parents taking a responsibility for what happens in our school. And this is what we're learning. Number one, we have to provide structures to build the culture. And what I mean by that as teachers and as school leaders, we have to involve teachers because teachers are the developers of the culture. And so one of the things we're doing right now is a couple of structures that we're providing to build the culture in our school because we have climate checks on a regular basis where we're listening to what's happening in the school actually taking a pulse of the school by hearing from teams of teachers and students as a climate check. After we had the training with Teresa, one of the things that the counselors and admin and teachers that were there went back to do was to work on the culture check that's available through some of the training that Teresa's doing. And this is what we're doing is currently we're reworking the survey to survey every student to survey parents because sometimes you think you know what's happening in your school and as a principal it's nice to see all of the kids who are actively involved but you're not hearing the other voices of the students as she mentioned who are not actively involved. So we want to provide a forum for those. So that's again providing those structures that help us to hear what's happening. A follow up to that are focus groups led by students where students have a chance to talk to other students about what's happening in their schools. We do have safety and the respect at training and we have some leadership groups that aren't the traditional student council where students have an opportunity to take ownership in their building. An example is students who see an issue then at a recent assembly came forward and wanted to make a presentation to the rest of the student body because it's their school. So we want to make sure it's not my school it's not the teacher's school it's all of our school. So the second thing is being systematic in asking for feedback and ready to use it. We have two safe school liaisons that wander around our school all school day we have four youth care workers we have people out there who students feel that they can go to that aren't the regular counselors or administrators. And the other thing that we're trying to do is to make sure we're ready to revisit systems and structures that aren't working and make changes as we need to. What Josh's story and case in story has told me because I want to listen to those stories where students are not successful or where programs haven't worked again is that we have to be explicit and specific in providing opportunities for students to build their strengths and to build confidence and resilience. And again as I said to provide structures to build the culture and find lots of ways to ask and listen to students by asking students how do we listen to you. So that's a key for me is we have to ask students how can we hear from you. And we know this is about a race bullying but our focus has been on school culture and we see it as our responsibility to listen to students collectively and listen to teachers who hear things and know what's happening in their school. And I want to thank you for the opportunity to be here today. Thank you for that. Thank you for everybody from Frank Hurch. I'm truly inspired by what I'm hearing today and again I'm happy to be sharing this with Derek and Donovan Tracy Kennedy our safe schools coordinator and Hunter McKay as well. I have a bit of a power point. It's not been time so Frank Hurch wasn't timed either. Twenty minutes good stuff. No I understand but I need to say that our making connections program is really not an anti-bullying program but a suite of interventions I like that term that try to create a positive school culture that reduces antisocial behaviors and rewards the pro-social ones. So we have a bit of a story and it's not a pretty story just before I became principal we had a teen suicide in our feeder school young boy was 14 years old. It affected our school in a profound way because he was a member of our football team and we had him come up to the senior high because he was such a gifted athlete and so it took the school by surprise that he did this and we still to this day don't know why. A couple of months later another school committed suicide and now staff were devastated. It was a terrible experience for us all and every time we heard of Simon we were wondering what was happening next. In June of that year some students decided to go camping and they were doing kind of a tribute to those students. They got in the truck they loaded the back of the truck with students they went to the lake no drinking and driving involved just lost control of the vehicle and another one of our students died. Again totally devastating to our staff and we had to get grief counselors in we had to get counselors for the counselors but what it did do it opened us up to what do we do to connect our students what is actually connecting our students to the school and we knew we had to come up with a strategy so we talked about a system-wide approach to creating trust and respect and safety and success in our school and we needed to embed this into our growth plan so it's not just a one-off kind of thing it's a long-term plan for us and we hope to focus on safe schools and social responsibility and making for connections for our students. What we chose to do is because it was a massive task we chose to deal with our at-risk students first and so we come up with creative ways to identify them but over the past four years we focused on improving attendance and improving achievement by engaging and connecting our at-risk youth with at least one caring adult in the building that was our goal and what we found is by building empathy for these students we're building a more positive school culture and staff members were also able and willing to show empathy towards all students in all their classes students who feel welcome, safe and included are more likely to be protected against substance abuse, early sexual initiation and of course bullying behavior research also indicates that this feeling of being connected to the school also increases school attendance staying in school longer and academic achievement and of course this is the basis for effective behavior support and we have trained our teachers on that as well. You've heard Threat Assessment mentioned here today with Kevin Cameron and Teresa as well and Threat Assessment training also tells us that connecting students to an open and positive school climate is key to keeping schools safe. If students feel that the system is open they will come to you with these issues of bullying. They will come to you with their issues and you can help them with it. We have 40 video cameras around our schools and around our school and we tell students you're not ratting somebody out if you just tell us the time and place where these things are happening we'll make sure we're watching not uncommon to find a sticky on my desk about somebody who might be having some problems. Research has indicated that building positive relationships is a foundational piece in improving student performance and this has been a key part of our school goal for the past four years and again having a caring adult in the building helps improve attendance if you help improve attendance you're going to help improve academics as well so this connects to all the teachers in the school and really one of the main reasons we're there this is one of those systems we use to to teach our school code of conduct and again I can't remember who said it but this is posted in every classroom in our school but it's not a static document this one's a couple of years old right now but it's in every classroom it's taught every year and we look for innovative ways to teach it all the time and what I like about this it talks about what it looks like for trust and safety and then also what it looks like for success so if we know what it looks like we can reward that positive behavior and we try to do that I used to call this the Holy Trinity but I got a little criticism about that so it's now just the Trinity and think about it a three legged stool it's very stable and what we thought what makes a great school and we thought if the school has a great arts program a great academics program a great athletics program that would be a great school often times we're not balanced we also thought what kind of a mission statement do we have in terms of the environment and so we thought we want to build a healthier environment a stronger community and a better world and then we use this term stewardship a lot of students were familiar with citizenship but not with stewardship and so this is the idea that we don't really own this we just borrow it and we're going to use it we're going to leave it better for the next group that comes along and this led to a whole day kind of like the thought about a professional development day for bullying this is our professional development day for the environment our whole school shuts down we have guest speakers command keynote and then the afternoon we all leave the school and we go out and do good works in the community so it's really about teaching the adults in the building how we want things to go with these systems in place and you have to have the entire staff on side for us it was a little easier because of the story I told you when I started people were open what we needed to do is create empathy for students and once you do that then staff are more willing to look at ways to involve students so again just quickly some of the big things that we're working on some of these things are small things that we do that have huge leverage this particular one I put a star beside it it's called our meet and greet it's kind of a goofy little name I can't think of anything else to call it but we identify all our special needs students and we go around to all their teachers and talk about them we took it a step further we took any student who is at risk even a student who might be couch surfing or has left home or things that we know about that student we take all these students and we had we identified about 25% of our students and we went around to every single teacher as a group counselors, administration non-instructional staff and we had some strength and some challenge that the student would have it's really important that that first week that these students that are at risk when they meet their teachers for that week they don't end up on a bad term right away if we lose them that first week of classes we've lost them for the whole semester so we can give a teacher some strategies to deal with the students having a hard time it just gives them a leg up and a boost to get going we have another program called our Top 40 program and this is how we start identifying our students at risk so we just looked at away our grade 10 students that moved to grade 11 and they were dragging behind them two failures or 200 and more absences we put them on a caseload of a youth outreach worker, his mandate was to act as a shepherd and to follow those students around and herd them back to class if they were at a class his job was to liaison with teachers his job was to work with those students work with them getting he would even go to homes to pick up students' parents who couldn't make it for meetings he's really taking the job seriously, he's doing a wonderful job and the big thing is he's role modeled to staff the extra steps you can do to make students successful so the big thing here is as we started doing some of these interventions it's changing the culture of our school I've done these presentations before about some of these interventions that we do with the top 40 as well is that we have everybody gets their student photos and they get their student cards we get a batch of study cards we don't use for anything but it has a picture of the student on it so we pull out our at-risk students we take a $5 bill we stick it to the back of the student card at a staff meeting we put them all around the table and we invite staff to come up and pick one of these student cards with the $5 in the back with some demographics about the student when their birthday is, things like that and we encourage them to do something to connect with that student buy them something, take them over for a coffee do whatever and it's one of those small things that we do but again, big leverage and we talked about this already we tend to focus on the grade 9s and 10s as they come in so that they get initiated and they get some transitioning very quickly we have a special barbecue that we do for our students that entered the school this year we had a half our school was new because we did a 9 to 12 school instead of a 10 to 12 school and basically we have a barbecue where the staff serve the students we also have guest speakers talk to the students about what they need to be successful at the school I've got a term up there social lubricants it's kind of a sassy kind of term but basically it's just the things that we do that increase school spirit and the learning carousels are things we rotate the students through to teach them about what it needs to be successful at Timberline we use data we've done an anti-bullying survey that I went on the end looking for a good one I found a good one then we changed it for ourselves and we give it to our students twice a year and we use that data because it tells us where the bullying is taking place and therefore we can restructure our teacher supervision and the instructions are scan, move, interact with those students and hopefully we can have an impact there we use themes to create focus so in September it was the 3Ls bullying, loitering and language last month it was positives fine students doing something positive and we had reward packages with the teachers ranging from water bottles to hacky sacks to candy you name it and then we have an international co-op program that grad legacy the point about those two things was we wanted to create some things in our school that would call upon students to do something good for somebody else for example the grad legacy fund the grads were having these dry grad celebrations and raising tens of thousands of dollars and giving away we call them wedding gifts they were bar fridges, blenders, toasters and not really a big value to the students but we had a meeting some students didn't like it so to make a long story short we stopped giving out the presents we started taking the money that we would have spent on them and they created a grad legacy fund to give back to the community so SPCA we sent kids to Africa we did all kinds of things with that money kind of the last thing I want to talk to you about is a new program we started last year it's called the student advocates program and again I'm so delighted to be here to hear all these things that people are doing and I heard one young lady over there talking about how can we identify the leaders in the group maybe this would be a way to do that so basically we're looking at we wanted to do this by creating an anti-bullying survey which I told you about already but at the end of the survey we left four questions that we put in there one was they revolved around the four different types of bullying but the question really is who in your peer group would support you if you were being bullied in one of these four ways and we asked the students to name the people and at first they were saying well I don't want to name anybody this is good because actually we're going to talk to these people later and find out what makes them stand up for their peer groups and so we did the survey and then what we did is we took those list of names and we had maybe a hundred names and we collated that list down to who got the most votes in their peers in terms of who would support you if you were being bullied in that way and we took that same list of their thoughts on who would then we gave it to counselors, administration and even the school secretary got involved and what we ended up with would be Hunter McKay 15 votes, a T for a teacher a C for a counselor a V for a vice principal, a P for a principal and an S for a secretary so we knew we had the right person and the same with Donovan so we ended up with a list of about I think the first year about 40 some odd names and what we did is we had a meeting with those students called them down to the staff room they didn't know why they were being brought down there and we just looked at them and first of all it was a cross section of students that you would never believe would be together because they were so different and it's because it was a peer group selection so we'd have somebody put the goth to the geeks and we had a representative from each group and they were the alphas in that group what was important about them is they're not afraid of retaliation they're not afraid of recrimination so it takes all the power away from the bully so when we looked at that group the first thing I said is you all have something in common you've been recommended by your peers and your teachers as somebody who would stand up for somebody else and help stop bullying I want to thank you for that because you've reduced bullying in our school just by being who you are and then I said would you like to be involved in a program where you actually will get some training and you can go out and start working your magic with some training so we involved the RCMP John Howard and we gave some workshops on conflict resolution and what not and and then basically the idea was now they're empowered and we would turn them loose what we ended up getting was a wonderful group of students together and there they are and you can see the RCMP are there and what they're holding in their hands are these wonderful letters of appreciation from the RCMP it's suitable for framing to put that in a resume would be amazing and so now we have these students circulating in the school so I'm going to call upon I think I'll call one of the students to the same here's what we're going to do Kevin we're going to include students in the wrap-up part can we do that? because we're a little bit short on time thank you and great thank you very much that was well done you