La Center Middle School adopts program to prevent bullying

La Center Middle School principal Lauri Landerholm wants students to feel safe when they come to campus every day. With the help of school counselor Daniel Thiessen, the teaching staff has adopted the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program. 

Created by Norwegian psychology professor Dan Olweus, the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program has been able to reduce bullying among children and improve the social climate of classrooms. For nearly 40 years, Olweus has been involved in research and intervention work on bullying among school children and youth. In 1970, he started this large-scale project which is now generally regarded as the first scientific study of bullying problems in the world.

“This program is about changing the whole school climate, making it a safer and a better place to learn,” Landerholm said. “We want to make school a place that kids like and making them feel safer will go a long way toward that end. It’s hard to enjoy learning when people are mean or picking on you.”

After implementing the Olweus program at the start of the school year, the students participated in a survey. According to the results, 90 percent of students reported they have not experienced bullying or have experienced it only once or twice, 98 percent of students said they have not bullied another student and 57 percent reported they have tried to help another student stop a bullying incident.

{{tncms-inline alignment="left" content="<p class="p1">The Olweus Bullying Prevention Program is a comprehensive approach that includes schoolwide, classroom, individual and community components. The program’s goals are to reduce and prevent bullying problems among schoolchildren and to improve peer relations at school. The program has been able to reduce bullying among children, improve the social climate of classrooms, and reduce related antisocial behaviors, such as vandalism and truancy. The Olweus program has been implemented in more than a dozen countries around the world, and in thousands of schools in the United States.</p>" id="30a561e1-b788-4fd4-88a6-16c827b9e41f" style-type="question" title="The Olweus program at a glance" type="relcontent" width="half"}}

Although La Center Middle School reports less bullying than the national average, the 10 percent of students who did report bullying are being taken seriously. Students are participating in weekly class meetings to learn about the effects of bullying, what they can do about it and how they can work with adults to put a stop to it, even as bystanders.

“My primary piece is, kids hear that they’re not alone. They are not the only ones that have experienced this,” Landerholm said. 

“A big part of this program is how bullying affects the bystanders and what role bystanders have and that you can make a positive difference if you see or witness a bullying experience,” she added. “The goal is to help the kids know that they’re not alone and also to move them from that bystander circle from one that would take the side of the bully to one that might be neutral or one that might step up and say, ‘Hey knock it off.’”

Thiessen believes students are listening to these discussions each week and getting more comfortable talking about bullying with their classmates.

{{tncms-inline alignment="right" content="<p class="p1">After initial implementation of The Olweus program, La Center Middle School students participated in a survey in September. Here are the results:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p> <p class="p2">• 90 percent of students reported they have not experienced bullying or have experienced it only once or twice (the national average is 85 percent). </p> <p class="p2">• 98 percent of students report they have not bullied another student. </p> <p class="p2">• 57 percent of students reported that they have tried to help another student stop a bullying incident. </p>" id="ff54f0d3-f8de-4c26-8466-dfc564f14174" style-type="info" title="Survey results" type="relcontent" width="half"}}

“It went from just a couple of kids raising their hand to talk about it to almost half the class. More people are feeling more comfortable with sharing, whether it’s their own experiences or things they’ve seen,” Thiessen said. “We did have this fear that we were oversaturating with these meetings, but I’ve heard from students that they really enjoy them and they feel teachers are listening more now than they were in past years.”

Follow the four rules

There are four rules to this program: We will not bully others; we will try to help students who are bullied; we will try to include students who are left out; if we know that somebody is being bullied, we will tell and adult at school and an adult at home. Landerholm said these rules are posted in every classroom, in the hallways, the gym and the library.

Thiessen said the rule of including students who are left out could be the toughest one to follow.

“If a kid is sitting alone at lunch, that takes a lot of bravery to go sit with that person and not sit with your friends or say, ‘Hey guys, let’s go sit with so and so who’s sitting by themselves,’” he explained. “I think that’s probably going to be one of the hardest things to get kids to actually do, because I know it’s even hard for adults. That’s a big push for me. When you see those kids alone at lunch or the classroom, reach out to them.” 

When Landerholm was growing up, bullying was not part of the everyday vocabulary at school. She wants that dialogue to change at La Center.

“Times have changed a lot,” she said. “What we are doing here is really important in the bigger picture about helping kids grow up to have better skills, treat each other better, learn to cooperate and compromise, have differences but still accept one another.”