Bullying will Not be ToleratedApr 26 2010by Donny Giovannini, sophomore, Stanford University Montgomery High (Santa Rosa, CA), Safe School Ambassador Alum 2007When I think about what makes a program like Safe School Ambassadors so great, I think about self-responsibility. SSA makes students take ownership of their actions and their community. In middle school and high school I saw a fair amount of bullying. In the old system of discipline there was an inherent friction between the enforcers and the students. When I joined SSA, the leaders of the program told us, “This is your school, and bullying is something that will not be tolerated. We can give you the tools to help the problem, but you are going to have to put those tools to good use.” I looked at my school in a different light after becoming a part of SSA. I banded together with students from all different backgrounds and took a genuine ownership of my school. By influencing the root of the problem, we were preventing potentially violent and hurtful confrontations from ever happening. I could feel a shift in atmosphere of the school. Instead of worrying about external influences on behavior like getting caught and punishments, students were starting to put themselves in others’ shoes and appreciate what they were feeling. I started to notice and interact with kids that were never even on my radar before. When I got to college the lessons of SSA still resonated. During the fall of my freshman year I started a social experiment that tested my political science professor’s stance that people are naturally competitive when it comes to available resources. I thought about how everyone locks their bike whenever they park it anywhere. While a lock may be an effective means of keeping possession of your bike, in some ways it assumes what my professor assumes— that given the opportunity people will take it. So, I decided to take my lock off of my bike for an entire quarter and replace it with a sign that read, “If this bike is stolen, $450 will not be donated to the St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital.” So like the SSA program, I focused not on external means of safety like bike locks (or in the case of schools — metal detectors, cameras and police), but rather on the morality of the issue at hand. Forcing a potential bike thief to stop and think about the consequences of his/her actions might make them reconsider stealing all bikes. The results of the experiment? Despite consistently parking my bicycle in a part of the quad known for thefts, my bike was never stolen and at the end of the quarter I donated the $450 I had raised to the St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. I can truly say that SSA changed my perspective on communities and reminded me that empowering people to make the right choice pays off for society in the end.
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