Anti-Bullying Kids Are Heroes

Garden City Middle School L.E.A.D.E.R.S. (Leave no one out; Empower yourself/stand up to the bully; Amuse with humor; Distract the bully; Enlist help; Rumors stop with you; Support the victim), students who take the topic of bullying very seriously, recently discussed the implications of physical bullying.

Discussions were guided by reading teacher and Anti-Bullying Club (ABC) advisor Kimberly Greenwald at the club’s June screening of The GCMS Early Show, a video members made to help educate about bullying. Social worker Noreen Bonagura shared in summarizing the year’s events. 

Ms. Greenwald and Ms. Bonagura led the LEADERS in the discussion of physical bullying. Each student was asked to write down at least one TV show or movie that included bullying and then discussed: Do TV shows encourage kids to bully? Why/Why not? The students watched several YouTube videos depicting bullying situations and identified the specific types of bullying they observed, identified the bystanders and discussed strategies to help the victims.

Students discussed why they thought New York State was one of the top 5 worst bullying states and asked how that statistic could be changed – turning a negative into a positive. Stories of how other students made a difference in their communities were distributed and the students were asked to create one activity to help reduce bullying. 

“Well, that created a hailstorm of activities,” commented Ms. Bonagura. “Each LEADER went back to their respective home bases, taught the lesson and talked about what they could do to make a difference at the middle school or in the community. The variety of ideas and activities that each home base came up with was tremendous. They included the following: one sixth-grade performed a play about stopping bullying and becoming upstanders instead of bystanders; students made videos or put on plays about bullying behaviors and how the middle school is a bully-free zone; students brought in supplies, collected money and shipped a care package to a school in Japan; collected monies, bought and decorated a recycling can for the cafeteria; wrote letters to the bus drivers thanking them for all that they do during the school year to keep them safe; and held bake sales, juice sales and candy sales during their lunch periods and raised money for JDRF (Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation), Camp Anchor, the Mollie Biggane Melanoma Foundation, Memorial-Sloan Kettering, the Inn in Hempstead, the Cancer Center at Winthrop Hospital and the Red Cross.”

“To date,” Ms. Greenwald explained, “over $3,000 has been collected from these activities. Several of the home bases that raised the money contacted other charitable organizations and enlisted them to contribute a matching gift. When all was tallied up, we raised over $5,000 to send to these very worthy causes.”

During their last LEADERS lesson for the school year, Ms. Greenwald and Ms. Bonagura talked about “Paying it Forward” and “Acts of Kindness.”

“I truly feel that this year's group of LEADERS embraced the activities presented, encouraged their classmates to implement a plan of action and the results speak for themselves,” Ms. Bonagura stated. “The students at Garden City Middle School had the ability to make a difference and they did. They inspired and empowered each other and are moving towards being a generation of ‘doers.’ These students recognized the need to do something, believed in their ability to get it done and got it done.”