Letter From The Principal: Preparing For Rachel's Challenge

Last Sunday night I watched the Dateline NBC news story about Phoebe Prince, the young girl who took her life after experiencing cruel and excessive bullying from classmates at South Hadley High School in Massachusetts.

I was saddened by the actions of the students who had bullied and victimized Phoebe.

Why did they do this? What made these young adults think it was OK to treat another human being like this? What outcome were they hoping for?

I wish I could say this type of behavior happens at other schools—not at —but I know this isn’t true. We all know that bullying happens everywhere and every day; however, this doesn’t mean we have to accept it and there are definitely steps we can take to proactively address bullying.

As many of you know, on April 16, 2012, Northeast is hosting Rachel’s Challenge. We have been advertising Rachel’s Challenge on our Daily Announcements and students are beginning to ask, “What is Rachel’s Challenge?”

Northeast students are too young to remember, or possibly even know about, the tragedy at Columbine High School in 1999, but through this assembly they will be introduced to Rachel Scott, a seventeen-year-old girl, who was the first person killed at Columbine. They will learn the powerful, true story of how this young girl knew that kindness and compassion were the keys to reaching and impacting adolescents.

Northeast students will learn that Rachel Scott had a simple theory that one act of kindness could change the world and that although students are bombarded daily with bullying and negativity we can overcome this with kindness.

Two weeks before she was murdered, Rachel Scott wrote a Code of Ethics for her English class. In this paper she challenged the reader to “test them for yourself” because, who knows, by doing these “you might just start a positive chain reaction.”

At Northeast, we hope to start our own positive chain reaction by keeping the momentum going after Rachel’s Challenge. Thanks to the efforts of Joey Goldman and Meghan Mudd, 8^th grade students, Northeast will start a FOR (Friends of Rachel) club at Northeast called Zero Conflict. Joey and Meghan both say, “If you can stop the conflict before it starts, you’ll have zero conflict.”

The goal of this club is to recognize that our focus on anti-bullying efforts doesn’t end with Rachel’s Challenge or other assemblies. Instead, it means that Northeast students must commit to treating one another with kindness and compassion and they must commit to standing up to negative treatment of one another.

Please keep the date of Tuesday, April 17, 2012, from 6:30-8:30 PM open on your calendar. I hope you will join us at NHS for the Rachel’s Challenge Community Event.

I look forward to seeing you there.

Thank you,

Kim