Joanne McQuarrie, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter | [email protected]
Pink Shirt Day started in Canada in 2007 in Nova Scotia when two Grade 12 students saw a new student being harassed and threatened for wearing pink.
The pair, David Sheppard and Travis Price, bought 50 pink shirts and handed them out to their classmates to wear the next day.
Since then, schools around the world have raised awareness about bullying and helped provide tools to deal with it, celebrating Pink Shirt Day each year.
In Jasper, students and staff at École Desrochers, École Jasper Elementary School and Jasper Junior/Senior High School wore pink in some form on Feb. 23 to celebrate the day.
“It’s so important that every student feels secure at school... that they feel they belong,” said Marie-Andrèe Arcand, a Grade 3-4 teacher at École Desrochers, who organized Pink Shirt Day activities at the school this year.
“Bullying is negative. It doesn’t help with learning or well-being,” she added.
“It’s important to teach the students what bullying is. (It’s) a behavior that’s repeated.”
Arcand said it’s also important to teach students how to be witnesses and to act on a situation.
She referred to how Sheppard and Price acted on what they saw in 2007, which ended up bringing a positive change all over the world.
“Whether it’s at recess or the library, there’s not always an adult who sees it and acts right away, so students need to witness it and act on it,” she said.
“If they feel they are comfortable with it and have the tools to act on it, they can say, ‘Hey, that’s not nice,’ for example.”
Arcand added if students aren’t comfortable acting on a situation when it happens, they can tell their parents or an adult in charge.
She pointed out bullying takes many forms and is not always recognized for what is.
“It can be physical, verbal, social—excluding someone constantly (for example),” she said.
On Feb. 23, at École Desrochers, a book called “It’s Enough” was read in Grades 3-6 classrooms, and a video will then be shown to the entire school.
“It’s to see the difference between the bully, the bullied and the witness,” Arcand said.
“It’s an amazing video.”
As well, from kindergarten to Grade 3, students went over a book about a dinosaur who is bullied and talked about it.
“Books are so powerful,” Arcand said.
“When we read a book with students, they make an association between the book and their lives.”
This year, École Jasper Elementary School took a unique approach to Pink Shirt Day, focusing on a positive way to deal with bullying.
“One of the best ways to prevent bullying is to focus on kindness, what it means,” said Principal Eric Bouchard.
“It’s as simple as asking someone to join you for lunch, talking with someone you don’t usually talk to.”
Students and staff at École Jasper Elementary School started the day with a short video about why Pink Shirt Day exists.
Then students brainstormed in their classrooms about kindness, specifically “how they are kind, and how they feel when people are kind to them, then... about ways, ideas for kids in our school to demonstrate kindness,” Bouchard said.
Each student was given a piece of paper on Feb. 18 to write their actions of kindness, or a message of kindness on, something that demonstrated kindness.
“We’re focusing on what kind of actions... that prevent bullying,” Bouchard said.
The scribes brought the paper back to school and one from each student was folded and put together to form a 260-link chain.
“The metaphor for us is one action leads to another,” Bouchard said.
“If you do something kind for someone, that person does something kind, and the chain gets longer and longer. One kind act leads to another. The second metaphor is if we all do kind actions, then the chain gets stronger and we’re all stronger as a learning community.”
This chain of kindness was put up in the gym on Feb. 23.
“This is another thing that brings our school together; we’re all on the same team,” Bouchard said.
Barb Schmidt, teacher and student council advisor at Jasper Junior/Senior High School, said in an email that the school emphasized the importance of kindness.
All teachers led a short lesson in the first period where students reflected on a video, discussed and then contributed to a collective visual definition of what kindness looks like and feels like.
“As a surprise ‘random act of kindness’, all students (were) given a special donut to commemorate Pink Shirt Day, which is dedicated to anti-bullying and fostering a culture of kindness,” Schmidt said.
