Dressed in orange from head to toe, students and staff at the Resilience Academy enjoyed a variety of activities to end Unity Week on Oct. 18.
Participating in bowling, table tennis, board games, arts and crafts, and more, the students celebrated a successful week of bringing awareness to bullying prevention.
Earlier that day, “students made a pledge against bullying by making a paper chain and worked together to make posters about being inclusive, accepting and caring for one another,” shared Christina Olson. Olson, a teaching assistant who is also co-teacher of the Peer Leadership class and co-leader of the Students Against Destructive Decisions (SADD) club, was a driving force in planning the week’s events.
Quinlan O’Neil shared the message he wrote on a poster, “Never give up."
The week aligns with the National Bullying Awareness Month, with the goal to “educate students on being digitally responsible and why it’s important to be an upstander not a bystander,” according to Principal Kiesha Tillman. Events amplified student voice throughout the week.
Drama students in Kathy Muenz’s drama class designed an anti-bullying skit which they performed on Thursday.
The actors contemplated several bullying scenarios they’ve seen in their lives.
Then, a group of them wrote a skit depicting a nerd being bullied and then robbed by a group of popular students and athletes and performed it in front of about a dozen peers.
“They wrote the skit collaboratively,” Muenz said, giving credit to the four students who performed, two of whom are new to the class.
Shawn Giglio, one of the more experienced actors said writing the skit was simple.
Micheal Ford, who is accustomed to doing voice-only parts, decided to get involved with acting because, “A large part of it (doing voices) is acting and what better way to do it than this?”
But when the skit was over, the session didn’t end. Tillman had a surprise for the audience members who are all members of either Student Government, the new Peer Leadership class or SADD club.
“I need three volunteers from the audience,” she said, encouraging the cast to pull their friends onto stage. “You’re going to create another skit.”
The larger group went into the cafeteria across from the Learning Commons to come up with an idea and rehearse, settling on a group of students making fun of another student who then turned around, sat in a corner and cried.
After they performed, Tillman asked, “We’ve been talking about being an upstander. What would an upstander do?”
Students responded with a variety of answers ranging from telling the group not to bully her, going up individually to some of the group members with whom they are friendly and telling them it wasn’t right to going over to the student and comforting them.
Ford said he enjoyed the improv skit more because there were so many ideas.
Unity Week also featured a presentation from Mental Health America for student leaders, as well as a whole school assembly from Leclerc's Martial Arts on anti-bullying themes.
Tillman explained that the weeklong programming is an expansion of the one day event the school held last year. She looks forward to Unity Week growing more in the years to come.