Parents and students at the Redondo Beach Unified School district are fighting back, and bullies at the Redondo Beach Unified School Districts are being taught that they can’t get away with what they used to anymore. Three years ago, RBUSD took up arms and transformed the lives of children by implementing the “Safe School Ambassadors,” a program focused on dealing with bullying by teaching kids and teachers in every school how to recognize bullying and understand what to do when they see it happening.
“This program,” said Assistant Superintendent Frank DeSena, “is aimed at giving students strategies on how to deal with bullying when they see it. It teaches them how to not just be bystanders. It gives them a history and understanding.”
DeSena, the Redondo Beach Educational Foundation and the PTA council recognized that bullying was becoming a problem in all the schools, and realized that they had to take action. They looked into other anti-bullying programs and ended up implementing the “Safe School Ambassadors” program because of how it dealt with the problem from the ground up.
“To call this just a bullying program would miss the point,” said Jeffrey Rosadini, the program leader at RBUSD. “Kids have been empowered to step in.”
Each school has between 30-to-40 school ambassadors and 8-to-10 staff that go to a two-day training session. Once the students and staff are done with the training they meet in small groups every other week to report what they saw and how they helped.
“We are seeing positive things going on here,” Rosadini said.
According to DeSena, the program has been a success. However, because of the nature of the offences there isn’t any data as of yet.
“Data is hard to crunch,” said DeSena. “Sometimes with more focus on bullying there is more reporting, so it may even appear that bullying has gone up.”
“There are always issues (of bullying) all the time. Sometimes they are minor, sometimes they are significant. It is an ongoing issue at schools,” said DeSena. “It was an important enough problem that we wanted to take a stand.”
DeSena and the Safe School Ambassadors are combating a different kind of bullying these days than just schoolyard tiffs. These days, bullying has gone wireless, exploding on the internet through emails and Facebook. Cyber bullying, has become not simply a problem for the web.
“The laws with cyber-bulling are murky,” said DeSena. “At the schools we have Facebook blocked, but students can still get onto it on their cell phones. We get complaints from parents that ‘somebody posted this on so-and-so’s wall on Saturday’ and they don’t know what to do. If it affects school life, we deal with it. They can be disciplined even if it doesn’t happen within the school environment.”
Bullying may have morphed into another form, but the old bullying still exists, and more students are learning the tools to combat it.
“We have all at one time been bullied,” said DeSena, “This program is especially helpful because with this issue students often know way more than the staff, and we are giving them the tools on how to respond.”
