Building positive habits are important to counteract negative behavior, according to the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Therefore, the best way to prevent negative physical and verbal behavior in teens with developing brains is to encourage and reward positive behavior. These reinforcements can help students be successful inside and outside of school and can prevent physical and verbal violence. At Lakota, there have been many efforts to reduce negative behavior. While Lakota is moving in the right direction, there is certainly more that can be done.
One way that East has made an effort to decrease students misbehaving in the hallways is making sure that students do not stay in the building after school. If students have a club, sport, or other activity that they need to be in the school for, then they may stay in the building, but if students are just messing around in the hallways, then they have to wait outside.
However, many students, especially sophomores who do not have their license yet, have to wait for whoever is picking them up from school to show up. So, it would be useful to students to more widely advertise other options such as EDGE Teen Center, which is a safe space for students to go connect with their peers, work on homework, get access to free tutoring, or even earn volunteer hours.
In terms of verbal violence, especially in the hallways in between classes when there is no designated supervisor over students, there are many topics brought up in conversation that would not be tolerated in the classroom. This ranges from verbal bullying about the way people dress to completely unacceptable jokes about students’ personal lives.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in the year 2020-21, around 19 percent of students from ages 12-18 said that they had been bullied in school. That is almost one in every five students.
A direction that Lakota could consider going is teaching a class at the high school level about how to address heavy topics that students should not be joking about. Students could be taught about how to approach speaking about these topics and how to communicate with each other in a respectful way. More education about the way traumatic events affect students could decrease the amount of verbal bullying that students endure. It is very possible that some students simply do not realize how their words and actions influence others.
However, it is impossible to completely control the way that students treat each other, even when they are in the school building. While this is an issue, House Bill 123 led to many improvements in the efforts being made towards the improvement of mental health for students here at Lakota. Not doing well in classes can lead to stress for students, but being in advanced classes and having a lot of pressure to succeed also causes stress.
According to the Ohio Legislature, House Bill 123 deals with “school security and youth suicide awareness/training,” and it requires schools to teach curriculum about being safe physically and emotionally. This will help students to better learn how to cope with stress, which will likely lead to less bullying.
Instead of the program Hope Squad, East now has a new mental health program called Hope and Strength at the main and freshman campus. This curriculum includes anti-bullying, breaking the stigma of mental health crisis, and suicide prevention. This program will continue what Hope Squad did last year and make sure that students have a student-led group that they can go to if they are in need of someone to talk to. Part of this program’s goal is to reduce verbal bullying, and will help students realize the importance of speaking respectfully to others. Another goal
of this program is to spread positivity throughout the school, which will also counteract misbehavior among the student body.
Lakota is definitely moving in the right direction in terms of working against physical and verbal violence. If Lakota continues to move in this direction, even more of this violence at school will be eradicated and students will feel even more at home in the building.