"One Thing" for Tues. Jan. 28

In addition to it being Bell's Lets talk day (an initiative to raise money and awareness for mental health issues), I was at day one of a two day workshop from ERASE Bullying:

http://www.erasebullying.ca/

I was at this last year and presenter Rob Rai talked to us about anti-bullying strategies to use in our schools and to be proactive in our approach to all types of bullying.

Today was quite different even though it is a continuation of the same program (a 5 year plan but forth by the BC government). Tanya Weister, a Vancouver Police Officer, was our speaker today. The focus was on Threat and Risk Assessment and it was a bit of an "eye-opener" for me. I like to think of schools as safe places and we watched several videos of (mostly American) news clips where that was not the case. It's been 15 years since the Columbine. A lot has happened since that watershed moment. We talked about how there are imitators out there and people wanting to "beat" whatever tragic event had come before it. Terrible stuff. We also talked about under-reacting and how that might have (by several people in several instances) been the real downfall in the case of Columbine. After all the evidence, and being able to look back at what happened now, it seems like more could have been done by everyone involved given that Dylan and Jason had been building pipe bombs and people knew about it.

It was discussed that communication is a key to helping prevent incidents (of any level really). Having an open flow of communication between families, staff and administration and being able to include the school's police liaison in any issues that arise should go a long way to potentially diffusing them before they get worse.

One of the other big pieces today was social media and it's relationship within our schools in the mobile device era we are now in. According to research studies, children are now only exploring half of what their parents have explored (out in nature). They don't hike, play in their backyard (if they even have one) and don't catch frogs or climb trees like we used to. This means they are spending time "connected" to others online, but we are losing person to person contact as a result. This also may lead to children developing lower levels of empathy for others.

It was all pretty overwhelming actually and I went home mostly worried about my son. So we talked a bit about video games and the internet and then went and played some basketball. I'm just glad we are tackling issues ahead of time in a proactive manner in our school system and not waiting for things to happen.