Santa Maria’s high school district is tackling bullying with a two-part mentorship program called WAR (We All Rise) Guardians, which kicks off with an event at Santa Maria High School on Feb. 24.
The event marks the program’s first part, which teaches Santa Maria Joint Union High School District students and parents about the signs, symptoms, and prevention of bullying. The Sun explored that topic as well in a Nov. 30 story called “The bully effect.”
For that story, Thesa Roepke, early childhood studies coordinator at Allan Hancock College, told the Sun that bullying tendencies often start at very young ages and can continue through adulthood, and they have a cyclical effect.
“Children who are bullied have difficulty in moving forward with having productive relationships with others,” Roepke said. “It affects their ability to make friends. A lot of them tend to be either introverted—they withdraw—or they extrovert. So eventually they can also have some aggression with being bullied.”
According to the California Center for Disease Control, 18.5 percent of California high school students report bullying on school property. California National Guard Sgt. Dan DeNoyer, WAR Guardians cofounder and CEO, will tackle that trend at the local level by empowering Santa Maria’s high school students through the WAR event later this month.
But that’s only the first part of the program—the second half, called the “Guardians Program,” aims to train students and teachers to rehabilitate students who bully, mentor those who’ve been bullied, and “create a camaraderie in the school built on respect,” according to a district press release.
The program will work alongside the district’s bullying reporting system, called the “bully button.” The button is on each high school’s website, and students struggling with bullies can click on it to fill out a report form.
“It’s an online reporting tool that helps us comply with the state law that mandates schools have a process to deal with bullying,” district public information officer Kenny Klein told the Sun. “It’s just another way to ensure that our students are focused on learning the skills they will need in life and are not distracted by bullies. It’s very difficult to deal with this behavior if it’s not reported.”
The kickoff event for WAR Guardians will run from 9 a.m. to 10:15 a.m. on Feb. 24 in the Ethel Pope Auditorium at Santa Maria High School.
This article appears in Feb 9-16, 2017.
