As the month of October comes to an end, we here at PALCS want to thank every single person who was involved in our anti-bullying and bulling prevention activities throughout the month. With October being National Bullying Prevention Month, our Guidance Department sponsored various activities to promote and bring awareness to bullying and prevention.
Our students, families and staff participated in projects and activities like the Kindness Rocks Project, which encourages everyone to make kindness contagious by spreading optimism through writing kind messages on a rock and placing them around the community for others to find. We also created a Digital Kindness Wall, where all were welcome to share kind thoughts and motivational words with one another.
On October 25th, our staff and many in the PALCS community participated in Unity Day by wearing orange to show their protest against bullying. All were encouraged to post their photos wearing orange, creating kindness rocks and participating in anti-bullying activities using the #PALCSUnite and #UnityDay.
National Bullying Prevention Month was founded by the Parent Advocacy Coalition for Educational Rights (PACER), a parent training and information center which provides resources for all students, including those with disabilities. Beginning as one short week of activities and events in 2006, awareness was raised to a full month in 2010 and has become a “nationwide call to action around education communities to the roles in bullying prevention.” Joined by national organizations, schools including PALCS, parents, teachers, counselors, and students from around to country, PACER encourages everyone to get involved in this nationwide campaign and make a difference.
Our mission this month was to join as a community to discredit the thought that bullying is just a rite of passage for students and we should look the other way. Instead, we want to raise awareness, on not only bullying prevention, but also signs of bullying and the long-term effects it can have on a person. We want to thank our guidance department for spearheading this campaign here at PALCS.
We hope that the topics of bullying and bullying prevention will be continuously discussed, not only in October, but all months of the year, making prevention a priority always. Let’s stay united as a community and show that when it comes to bullying, we have zero Tolerance!
