On February 9,2011 TJ students gathered together in hopes of ending cyber bullying and to inspire other schools to follow along.
Artwork by Mia Nogueira
“I’m really excited for this program to go into effect. I am tired of being bullied on Facebook and all of this has to stop,” said junior Sammie Eckhart as she walked out from the first meeting of the On A Positive Note Club.
A group of 20 to 30 students gathered to form a group called On A Positive Note to reach the goal of condemning the bullying that has escalated in the last month. “We are taking this problem head on,” said Junior Maddi Doro, who is the president of the Spartan Junior class, and was involved in running the meeting.
The meeting started off by Doro sharing a tragic story of the outcome of bullying in schools. One month ago a teenage girl from Massachusetts was being bullied and one bully told her to go kill herself. No one knew that this girl was going to take this comment seriously and actually commit suicide. This story really set the serious mood for the teens, and members say it has encouraged them to make a change.
“This club has also been inspired because of the confessions page created on Facebook,” said Doro. “On this page people said really rude, mean comments about certain people, and many people’s feelings were hurt. We want to stop this and make a positive change. We want to end up not only affecting TJ, but also many other schools who have this problem,” said Doro.
The members of the club wasted no time in discussing ideas of how to eliminate the problem of bullying and teasing. They came up with many ideas of how to reach out to the community and inform everyone about the effects bullying has on teens. “We came up with the idea of setting up a booth at the CSAP carnival. We are thinking of having people pledge to help stop the bullying and then after they do, we can give them maybe like a sticker showing their support,” said Doro. Other ideas were thrown out, of possibly having a certain group of students become counselors for those students who are victims of bullying.
TJ junior Andrea Jones took the initiative to counteract the negative page on Facebook by making a positive page. She took pictures of people who were targeted and wrote positive things about each one. “We thought that was really great and inspired us to keep the page going and make one for everyone to go on and leave comments,” said Doro.
When the meeting ended Doro announced there would be many more to come and they were going to attempt to get that booth and Facebook page going. “We’re very excited that the students are taking this issue into their own hands,” said Principal Sandra Just. “With this problem in the hands of the students we know it will get fixed soon, because they have a big impact on what is going on.”
To become a member of this club, contact Maddi Doro or listen to the Spartan Edition for an announcement for the next meeting.
