Mixing it up at lunch

How do schools combat bullying when it's such an ingrained part of school life, a sneaky subculture that operates under the radar, despite anti-harassment policies and pep talks?

Iowa's had anti-bullying legislation for years. Teachers, school leaders and parents stand firmly against it. Still, local kids say, bullying happens, and in the wake of a national rash of tragic bullying-related teen suicides, the question takes on new urgency: What else can we possibly do?

A handful of Corridor schools yesterday tried out one strategy that might surprise you: They looked back down the chain. All the way back to kindergarten - and to lunch.

Tuesday was national Mix It Up at Lunch Day, a program created by the Southern Poverty Law Center to help schools create more inclusive communities. It's designed to shake up the lunch room - if only for a day - and get kids out of their cliques. To allow them to learn more about their classmates - not just the few friends they gravitate to and feel safe with.

The rules are simple: Sit by someone you wouldn't normally and have a conversation. Learn about each other.

Teaching students to value difference can be a powerful antidote to social exclusion - and to bullying. As Principal Barb Mueller-Jenkins told me, “Not accepting a person's difference isn't bullying, but it can become bullying.”

Mueller-Jenkins wants her students not only to understand that bullying is wrong, but that they've got a responsibility as bystanders, too. That lesson is the focus of Coralville Elementary's schoolwide, yearlong behavior-support curriculum about accepting difference, she said. At lunch Tuesday, that lesson seemed to be sticking.

Five-year-old Hadleigh is too young to worry much about the kind of routine, all-out taunting that has made the news recently. She had to think a minute when I asked how to spell her name. Has she even heard of bullying?

“Yes,” she said, looking down at her sparkled purple kitty shirt. “But I never do that.”

Hadleigh had drawn an elaborate smiley face - with stick legs and circle feet, and a mop of short, squiggly hair - to show that she had made a new friend at lunch: Lyova, also 5.

“Bullies treat you like a baby,” he tells me.

“It feels very sad.”

They might not understand all the details yet - at 5 years old, these kids' understanding of bullying is new. Heck, these kids are only starting to notice differences, let alone figure out how they feel about it. (“I have one friend who is a girl,” Lyova tells me, sticking his hands deep into his pockets.)

But they're listening.

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nifer.hemmingsen@sourcemedia.net