By Stephanie Bunker
Moapa Valley Progress
The students at Mack Lyon Middle School have taken a stand against bullying this year, Nancy Postma the teacher of the “Self Contained Special Education” students and School Counselor Kim Delgadillo have come up with a program to help mainstream Mack Lyon students better include and embrace the children with a higher likelihood of being bullied.
The program reaches out to students who are in the school’s Self Contained program. Self Contained programs provide a separate learning environment to students whose social, emotional or behavioral needs require supervised special education services throughout the school day.
The new program at Mack Lyon to help these students is called Everyone Loves a Friend (ELF). It began with several 7th grade girls who volunteered to invite Self Contained girls to be a part of their lunchtime group. There were five Self Contained girls in the group and as many as 15 volunteers helping them. Because there were so many volunteers the program had a schedule laid out to rotate through the girls.
Each day at the start of lunchtime a volunteer picks up a Self Contained student at a meeting place and takes her to a specific spot for lunch with her friends. One of the great benefits of this program is that the Self Contained girls learn age appropriate behaviors, Delgadillo said. The girls learn how to interact with their peers. The Self Contained girls can have age-appropriate conversations with their peers, talking about what kind of music and clothes they like, she said.
“It has helped the Self Contained students feel like they are part of the school,” Delgadillo said. “One of the girls now walks around exclaiming, ‘I have friends!’”
At the start of the school year Delgadillo approached a few of the 7th grade girls about the possibility of starting the ELF Program. She said that she was overwhelmed with the response she got.
Training sessions were held for the volunteers and a lunchtime meeting was held to kick off the ELF program.
The volunteer girls learned how to redirect misguided behaviors from the Self Contained students and how to be assertive with them.
Blakey Anderson, Kaila Enosa, and Madison Mortensen are volunteers with ELF. They say that they have enjoyed their time with the Self Contained girls. They explain that sometimes the Self Contained girls have sad days and they try and cheer them up.
“It’s cool to help them and see them change,” Anderson said.
For now the program only includes 7th grade girls and the five Self Contained girls. But Delgadillo said that the boys at Mack Lyon are also expressing interest in being a part of the program. Delgadillo explained, however, that there is only one Self Contained boy at the school and he is already very social with the other kids.
Social values are important to the staff at Mack Lyon. Delgadillo and Postma have posted anti-bullying signs to regularly remind the kids the importance of being friendly with their peers.
