By Lindsey Coad
Ayan Karshe used to be the “violent one.” She’ll tell you that herself.
But it’s hard to believe when you shake the gentle hand of the 16-year-old, as she makes her way out the front doors of Ridgemont High School in Ottawa’s south end.
Being the youngest of four teenagers, Ayan knew what it felt like to be the target of name-calling. When she couldn’t fight back with a better insult, she would lash out.
“To them it was just good fun, but to me it was painful,” she recalls.
On this perfect afternoon, the autumn sun meets her gaze as she sits cross-legged under a shady maple tree in the schoolyard. She’s calm, thoughtful.
“Now I’ve learned that they were just egging me on and I’ve learned to walk away or tell them how I feel.”
Last year, Ayan’s teachers chose her to attend a national conference on peace building, where she learned to take a step back in the heat of the moment, put herself in the other guy’s shoes and listen to where they’re coming from. “Listen, listen, listen,” she says.
Today she’s a peer mediator at her high school where she hears both sides of a conflict and helps students figure out a compromise.
“A club that’s called ‘peace building’ sounds kind of corny,” she says of the idea, which has slow to catch on. But Ayan still believes.
She says peer-to-peer conflict resolution can be a way to prevent extreme acts like assault. “I believe if students are given the chance to choose a different “out,” they’ll pick the high road instead of resorting to violence.”
Bullying is one of the biggest threats to safe learning environments, says Education Minister Gerard Kennedy, and yet this behaviour wasn’t singled out as an offence when the Conservatives introduced the Safe Schools Act in 2001.
“It’s very pernicious,” says Kennedy. “It really does drag down the (person) being bullied.”
At the time, no funding was transferred to school boards for intervention and prevention programs.
Young people weren’t trained to intervene in difficult situations, but that’s changing. A new pilot project in Ottawa is tackling the causes of youth violence and more subtle forms of bullying like name-calling and gossip.The students are allowed to talk it out amongst themselves.
Recently, Ayan helped train about 500 Grade 9 students in the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board. The Peacebuilders program is the result of a partnership with YOUCAN, a non-profit youth association that developed a peer mediation model and has already worked with individual Ottawa schools. The same pilot project will happen in Toronto and Edmonton by 2007.
Students learn techniques for “responding” with their heads versus “reacting” with emotion. Most physical fights on the schoolyard end up being misunderstandings a, says Ayan.
When a student acts out under this model, the principal might let them choose between peer mediation and the usual punishment. She says peer interveners can make a connection because they’re more in the “loop.”
“You’d hope that students have respect for teachers but they still don’t listen as much as they should. With peers, they have an instant respect,” says Ayan.
Schools in the Ottawa-Carleton Catholic School Board also invite peers to be part of the solution, according to superintendent Michael Strimas. “We don’t focus on statistics and numbers . . . we focus on those values of justice, respect and community,” he says of the board’s programs, where students work in pairs during recess to help peers solve minor problems.
The strategy worked three years ago for Pam FitzGerald’s son. The Grade 4 student was harassed by a bully who hit him and stole his toys, often through the guise of a so-called friendship, until the vice-principal stepped in.
“Bless her soul. She sat them down and sorted it out,” FitzGerald recalls of the “painful” situation that didn’t end with a suspension for her son’s bully. She was satisfied with the result.
“You can get the children to solve problems themselves rather than use their fists,” she observed. The boys drew up and signed their own contracts in a bid to stop the hurtful behaviour. Among the terms: walk away from an argument and tell the teacher on duty if there’s a problem.
FitzGerald, who serves as chairwoman of the Ottawa Carleton Assembly of School Councils, says zero tolerance isn’t the answer for curbing violence in local schools.
“I don’t think it’s done a damn thing, I’ll be quite blunt,” FitzGerald says of the act. “Yes, kids are suspended—so what? We suspend a kid for a couple of days and then the kid is back, maybe angrier.
“We want kids to have a sense of self-worth and to have a future. So if we throw them out of schools, essentially we’ve just moved our problem from the schools to the streets.”
She’d like to see sufficient government funding for permanent programs that can tackle the causes of bullying and violence.
The Ottawa-Carleton District School Board has operated a Safe and Caring Schools prevention initiative since 2000, which includes anti-bullying strategies and a popular “roots of empathy” program for students. But such projects aren’t mandated by the province so they aren’t covered under the education funding formula, according to a board spokesperson. Instead, they rely on provincial grants. Recently the board’s initiative “streamlined” two social workers into the regular school curriculum. Now only one of them is on the project at a time when suspensions are on the rise.
Nor does Ridgemont’s Peacebuilder program fall under the government’s funding formula.
But organizers hope that will change if student involvement is a success. They’ll evaluate Ottawa schools by monitoring the number of critical incidents at the end of this year, says Paulo Lobo, project coordinator for YOUCAN.
A spokesperson for the board says it’s possible the School Board new fundraising foundation might contribute to such programs in the future. The Education Minister says he recognizes the need for prevention strategies but hasn’t committed any dollars.
For now, experienced peace builders like Ayan will train new recruits with the hope of a sustainable program in three years.
Recently, Ayan overheard a group of girls teasing one of their friends, but they didn’t seem to notice she was taking it to heart. Finally, one girl in the group stopped and said: “Maybe we should stop talking about her.”
It’s a “small thing,” says Ayan, but it might be a sign that minds are changing.
She admits it would be hard to listen if a classmate told her how to deal with her anger—these things take time.
“I guess I’m hoping that it works,” she smiles.