Pink Shirt Day perfect first team event
Waiopehu College’s junior leadership team organised its first school-wide event during May to coincide with Pink Shirt Day. The day is about working together to stop bullying by celebrating diversity and promoting kindness and inclusiveness.
Pink Shirt Day began in Canada in 2007, when two students took a stand against homophobic bullying after a new student was harassed for wearing pink, and the day is now celebrated annually worldwide.
The junior leadership team at Waiopehu is made up of 11 Year 9 to Year 11 students, most of whom are first-time student leaders.
Year 11 student Courtney Fitzgibbon has been part of the team since she started college, and is also the liaison with the senior leadership team.
“We wanted to do something [for Pink Shirt Day] that would help raise awareness of how to speak up about bullying and to show how we should stand together,” she said.
As a group, the teens came up with the idea of providing a banner on which students and staff could write kind and positive comments.
The painting of the banner was completed by two of the team, then hung in the foyer of the main auditorium on the day before Pink Shirt Day, allowing students to come and add their personal messages.
Staff members Tacita Bohan, Lois Marshall and Alison Spencer are mentors for the junior leadership team, and were involved in setting the group up three years ago.
“Each year the applicants have to do a three-minute presentation as part of an interview process led by current members of the senior leadership team,” Bohan said.
Once students are accepted into the team, they attend a leadership day with team-building activities, then meet weekly to work on ideas and actions to take.
“The group is very much student led,” said Bohan.
“Staff are just there to act as sounding boards, to give guidance and to supply resources as needed.”
Another Pink Shirt Day activity the teens decided on was to provide a confession box, with the idea students could get something off their chest that was worrying them but couldn’t be shared with anyone.
Once filled, the contents were shredded and the staff member in charge of that job said there were at least a couple of hundred pieces of paper in the confession box by the end of school on Friday.
Bohan said there were also lots of really positive comments written on the banner, and students were busy taking selfies in front of it during their breaks.
Despite an unexpected tornado tearing through Levin the morning of Pink Shirt Day that meant the school roll was way down, the mufti day held still raised more than $200 for the Mental Health Foundation.
The junior leadership team has loads of other great awareness and fundraising ideas planned for the future, including environmental activities.