Schools awash in pink Thursday for Stand Up to Bullying Day

By Tina Comeau

THE VANGUARD

NovaNewsNow.com

An army of pink will stand up against bullying today as students and staff of elementary, junior and senior high schools across the province wear pink to recognize Stand Up Against Bullying Day on Sept. 11.

Stand Up Against Bullying Day was proclaimed last year by Premier Rodney MacDonald. The day will be held the second Thursday of every school year. The inspiration for the day came from two Nova Scotia high school students who created a pink-shirt campaign in support of a fellow student who was teased for wearing a pink shirt.

After a Grade 9 student was picked on for wearing a pink shirt on the first day of school last year at Central Kings school, Grade 12 students David Shepherd and Travis Pierce decided to take a stand against bullying. The students went out and bought pink shirts and gave them out to their classmates at their school, who wore them en masse to support the student who had been bullied and to send a message to bullies everywhere – back off.

“It’s our last year and we want to make a difference,” Shepherd had told Sara Keddy, the editor of Transcontinental Media’s Kings County Register newspaper. “At a young age you don’t know the difference between playful teasing and bullying. Doing it over the colour pink is just so stupid.”

The pink is alright message quickly spread to schools across the province, the country and even around the world.

This afternoon Premier Rodney MacDonald and Education Minister Karen Casey will join students at John MacNeil Elementary School in Dartmouth to help celebrate the anti-bullying day. The premier will also announce a new awards program to encourage more students to make a positive change in their schools and communities.

And today schools are doing just that.

“Thursday we’re encouraging all students, staff and families to wear something pink,” says Central School principal Janece McNutt. “We’re calling our day “Peace Promotion Day,” which supports the provincial initiative Stand Up to Bullying.”

At Arcadia Consolidated School, where pink will also rule supreme, each class will be creating an anti-bullying cheer for an afternoon assembly. Teachers will also be working on other activities in their classroom.

At Ecole Secondaire de Par-en-Bas, one of many schools last year to hold their own pink day following the lead of the Central Kings, a morning assembly was planned to encourage students to embrace the anti-bullying message, with a particular emphasis on standing up against cyber bullying. Last year students also filled out surveys on ways to further promote the anti-bullying message at their school and students also conducted a peer workshop on anti-bullying that it brought to some local elementary schools.

And the list goes on of how schools are marking the day.

Meanwhile as schools across the province are awash in pink, program experts from the Canadian Red Cross, who deliver anti-bullying and other violence prevention programs in Atlantic Canada, will be meeting in Dartmouth to plan further expansion of their award-winning programs.

The Red Cross violence and abuse prevention program is called RespectED. More than 10,000 children and youth participated in RespectED presentations last year in Atlantic Canada. It has components designed to address various types of abuse, tailored to various age groups. The anti-bullying component called "Beyond the Hurt" has been very successful in Nova Scotia junior and senior high schools and expanded in recent months to high schools in New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island.