Calling out violence, bullying is first step

It will be a long time before the public forgets that earlier this year, one student shot and killed another on the junior high campus at Watson Chapel. The thought of something like that happening is horrible enough, but to have it occur here amounts to a lesson that all school districts should heed as they secure their campuses.

It was perhaps appropriate that students from the Watson Chapel High School staged a march Monday in a show of support against violence and bullying. As explained by the organizer, Patricia Oates, a teacher at the school, students have to take this struggle on themselves. All that grownups can do, she said, is to give them the space where their voices can be heard.

Violence, of course, is easy to spot. But bullying, now with social media, is more nuanced. A 10th-grader said Monday that bullying, when she was younger, had caused her to be less outgoing. To be herself, to be the whole person she had been, she said, had caused her to be bullied.

Another young lady, an 11th-grader, said bullying gets in one’s head and is hard to shake.

Both, thankfully, said conditions were better now.

Rep. Vivian Flowers, a longtime lawmaker representing Pine Bluff, said seeing the 200 or so students stand up against violence and bullying was indicative of where Pine Bluff is as a whole. In short, we all want it to stop.

We couldn’t agree more with Oates and Flowers, and perhaps the most important part of Monday’s exercise is the calling out of violence and bullying. By shining a light on the issues strengthens those who are working to end them. To put it another way, if society doesn’t identify the problems, they continue unabated.

The Rev. Jesse Turner said that in one of the programs he oversees — the Pen or Pencil Mentoring Program — older students are asked to write essays about violence and bullying while younger students create posters on the subjects.

We can imagine that a few of them may have realized that they themselves have been part of the problem or at least not part of the answer.

That’s the reason these exercises are important. Sometimes the issue is with someone else and sometimes it’s with the person in the mirror. That realization, along with some positive peer pressure, can be a vehicle for change.