ISOLATION
Promise, a nonprofit founded by the families of students killed in the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut.
The first No One Eats Alone Day took place in 2012 in a handful of middle schools near San Francisco, according to Beyond Differences, the social-justice organization that promotes the movement. Five years later, 900,000 students in 2,000 schools across the U.S. participated in the 2017 No One Eats Alone Day.
Stewart Alternative has held this event for the past few years. This was the first that guidance counselor Corey Fry has worked at Stewart, and he was excited to see the results of it.
“Get ’em before middle school,” Fry said. “Middle school is when everyone is trying to establish a separate identity while they also want to be part of the group. It’s a time of easy isolation. Easy targets of bullying ...
“There’s so much power in, ‘Come sit with me,’ (and) ‘How are you doing?’” he said. “If I can teach the kids to care about each other just a little bit, that takes care of everything else.”
At first the students sat at cafeteria tables eating with their friends, but then teachers shuffled them around to new places. They watched videos about isolation and the stresses of being a kid.
“It’s a basic human need to feel like you belong,” said James Turner, a Buckeye Health Plan employee who led the discussion. “Everybody wants to feel respected. Everybody wants to feel loved.”
Then Turner talked to them about the effects of being ostracized at school. According to research, those include headaches, slacking attendance, sleep deprivation, depression and thoughts of suicide. The poor grades and higher risk of not graduating, he pointed out, have ramifications for the isolated child’s future.
Buckeye Health Plan employees come out every month to Stewart, a school that they’ve adopted, to talk to the kids about different topics, such as eating right and bullying.
“I think they heard me loud and clear,” Turner said after his talk, as the students ran up on stage to sign a banner with markers — their agreement to work to make sure no one’s left out.