Wednesday, February 14, 2001
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Wednesday, February 14, 2001 |
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Flat Rock is First School in Georgia to Offer SAVE Today's students face a multitude of challenges in their daily lives. Various mentoring programs are in place within Fayette County schools to help students deal with problems, anxieties and hardships that might hamper their learning abilities. Flat Rock Middle School has three such programs in place and is about to add a fourth. The newest program, called Students Against Violence Everywhere, is being widely used by schools in other states but Flat Rock will be the first school in Georgia to offer it. SAVE promotes safety and peace in schools. According to Flat Rock counselor Susan McEwan, the new program, which will be school-wide, will begin in home room and parallel with the character education curriculum currently being taught. Eventually a club will be formed that will meet after school. During SAVE meetings, students will have an opportunity to bring attention to problems they feel are plaguing the school and then develop ways in which to solve those problems. "This program has been very successful in other states and I am hopeful that it is going to be just as helpful to Flat Rock," says McEwan. Some examples of SAVE's success include helping to reduce the amount of theft in one school and cutting the number of fights in another. "One school was having a problem with stealing. What students found was that most of them were leaving their lockers open so they developed stickers to put on the door of open lockers and the theft decreased," McEwan explains. "Another school decided to target fighting by getting the administration to agree to serve ice-cream to all students every three weeks if no fighting occurred. After the first three weeks a fight broke out and the parties involved got booed by their peers so they stopped," she says. Flat Rock will kick off its SAVE rally March 9 at 8:30 a.m. in place of home room. In addition to SAVE, Flat Rock also has a successful student mentoring program with Burch Elementary where 58 students go to the elementary school twice a week to help kindergarten through fifth grade students with reading. Additionally, Peer helpers, called Eagle Wings, help target students who are in distress and peer mediators help to solve conflicts between students.
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