Bullying prevention program makes positive impact at Minnesota Adventist schools

The conference’s eleven elementary schools and one high school have a total enrollment of 343 and employ 18 full-time and five part-time teachers. Last year, conference leaders, with a grant from nonprofit Adventist foundation Versacare Inc., contracted with La Sierra's Center for Conflict Resolution at the Zapara School of Business to implement the internationally acclaimed Olweus Bullying Prevention Program. Olweus for North America operates out of Clemson University in Clemson, South Carolina and is based upon the world’s first scientific research on bullying conducted in the 1970s by Swedish psychologist Dan Olweus. Olweus offers an ongoing, school-wide approach to bullying that aims to change social culture and emphasizes intervention, empathy, awareness and standing up for others. The Olweus program is in place at more than 6,000 schools nationwide and has been used in more than a dozen countries for several decades.

This fall, following a pilot implementation last school year that included training sessions for teachers, parents, pastors and other leaders, as well as weekly classroom meetings with students, the Minnesota Conference schools reported a decrease in incidences of verbal bullying and other types of bullying from 17 percent to 3.38 percent, an 80 percent drop. 

The results derived from the evidence-based Olweus Bullying Questionnaire administered by conflict resolution center Olweus trainer Mindy Salyers. She surveyed the conference’s 3^rd through 8^th grade students in April 2014 and again in April 2015, before and after program implementation. Verbal bullying receded the most from 18% of bullying incidences in 2014, to 8% in 2015. The number of boys who reported incidences of verbal bullying fell from 20% in 2014 to 9% in 2015. The outcomes were announced during a conference Board of Trustees meeting on Oct. 6.

While no patterns of bullying behavior had been identified and bullying incidences in the conference’s schools have been isolated and random, the conference wanted to ensure their students were engaged in a consistently positive and Christian educational experience, stated Superintendent of Schools Connie McCormick.

“From the very first, we wanted to guarantee every Adventist school as an especially safe place for students and teachers, but we knew that not all had that experience. The hurt that some students felt was negating the effect of Christian education,” said McCormick.

She stated that bullying incidences reported at the conference’s schools involved mainly ostracism or belittling remarks. “We had not implemented any specific program other than the usual hit-and-miss approach where a teacher addressed a problem with the ingenuity of the moment, rather than a well-laid-out plan or course of prevention.”

McCormick's comments reference some of the important distinctions in behavior that Olweus training provides to the schools, according to Debra Pershing, the conflict center's coordinator for the Bullying Prevention Initiative for the North American Division of Seventh-day Adventists.

Stated Pershing, "Olweus helps adults and students adopt the evidence-based definition of bullying and to distinguish bullying from other negative behaviors such as fighting and rough-and-tumble play. Olweus also helps adults and students distinguish between different direct and indirect bullying. Most people think of bullying as being only direct bullying, which includes hitting, punching, name calling. Adults and students often don't realize that indirect actions, such as coaxing another to bully, or social exclusion, also meets the definition of bullying. Of course, social exclusion tends to be the most difficult type of bullying to address by the adults."

“When Mindy Salyers offered us the Olweus training and a grant to get us started, I became very excited,” said McCormick. She first learned about the conflict center’s work with the Olweus program through an article in the Adventist Review magazine published in 2012 when the conflict center introduced the program at the North American Education Conference sponsored by the denomination.

The Olweus program, designed for students ages 5 to 15, aims to address and mitigate bullying through a four-tiered awareness and prevention system that encompasses not only students and school personnel, but extends to the school’s community. Individualized intervention is designed for students who are targets of bullying, or who engage in bullying others and works to engage bystanders in preventing and reporting bullying behavior. The program defines bullying as repeated mean or hurtful words or actions directed at a person who has a hard time defending himself or herself. School administrators, teachers and staff are charged with initiating the program at the school level. 

While Olweus provides extensive training to adults on how to recognize and intervene in bullying, research shows that adults spot only five percent of the bullying behavior taking place.  Olweus works with schools to include in their school schedule time for students to participate in facilitated discussions designed to create empathy for each other. According to Pershing, "Only students can effectively intervene and change the school climate when it comes to bullying in the form of social-exclusion. Students want to intervene but don't if the adults do not support and encourage intervention." 

“It’s both a prevention program and an intervention program,” said Salyers. “It integrates prevention at all levels. It becomes the standard that it’s not cool to bully.”

On Oct. 14 and 15 she provided Olweus training for a group of about 15 new Minnesota Conference teachers. And in August she met with all the conference teachers during a retreat in preparation for the second year of the Olweus roll out. She also provided training for the summer camp personnel at the summer camp operated by the Minnesota Conference.

“Addressing bullying among our students has captured the attention of all of us,” McCormick said. “Tears were shed freely in the training as Mindy Salyers invited us to revisit a time when we had felt victimized. It was also good for us to re-examine our own words to make sure that we as leaders ‘do no harm.’”

Stone Ridge Christian School in Duluth, Minn., with a total of 12 students, is part of the Minnesota Conference education system. Previously, bullying incidences were dealt with in a reactive manner, said Rudy Carlson, the school’s K-8^th grade teacher. Carlson has taught at the small school for 10 years and has two full-time volunteers to assist him. “Now we [pre-empt], encourage and educate,” he said “By identifying and defining bullying, our students feel comfortable intervening when staff is not present, or have their attention diverted. Olweus has taught my students civility, politeness and decorum. Also, the program was a major factor in recruiting two of my students,” he said.

Additionally, the role-playing activities, group discussions and learning games that are a part of weekly school meetings serve as “a great way for the whole school to become closer as a family,” Carlson said.

The same day Minnesota conference trustees were presented with the Olweus bullying prevention incident reduction report, Hazelden Publishing, producer of the Olweus training materials released its annual Olweus Bullying Status Report in partnership with Clemson University and Professional Data Analysts, Inc. Hazelden is based in Center City, Minn. and is part of the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation. The report is based on survey responses collected and analyzed from a sample of 20,000 students in grades 3 -12 across the United States who completed an Olweus bullying questionnaire prior to participating in the program during the 2013-14 school year. Results showed that nearly one in five students were involved in bullying at school with 14 percent of students reporting they were bullied two to three times a month. Seventeen percent of students were involved either as a victim or as one who bullies others.

Salyers is one of nine certified Olweus bullying prevention trainers based out of La Sierra’s Center for Conflict Resolution.  Salyers was the center’s second Olweus trainer, receiving her training in 2013. Salyers was impressed with the program when the conflict center conducted its first rollout for two Adventist schools, A. W. Spalding Elementary School in Tennessee and John L. Coble Elementary School in Georgia.  Salyers is a school counselor who was working for Spalding. Following Salyers’ move to Minnesota, the conflict center and Salyers approached McCormick about the program and its benefit to the conference’s schools.

The Olweus program is currently in various stages of implementation at over 40 of the 900 or so Adventist schools across the United States. Grant funds from Versacare pay for training sessions and materials for teachers. In 2012 the church’s North American Division of Seventh-day Adventists, through the Center for Conflict Resolution, offered free of charge to all of its schools a survey from the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program to collect data on bullying and provide a framework for the discussion of bullying and violence prevention.

"That particular offer didn't get very far," says Pershing, "so we changed the offer to initiating pilot projects. Georgia-Cumberland Conference, under the leadership of Kim Thompson, associate superintendent, now one of the center’s Olweus trainers, was the first adopter of the program, implementing it at two of its schools."

The impetus for bringing Olweus to Adventist schools in North America came from the president of Versacare, Robert Coy. "Versacare emphasizes funding humanitarian projects administered by Adventist institutions and lay people," said Coy. "Our entire board is made up of individuals that believe there is nothing more important that helping children. We usually wait for grant proposals, but this project was the result of our own initiative. Virtually all of the board members, including me, have seen what bullying behavior unchecked can do in the lives of the students who bully and the students being bullied.

“After several attempts at projects that didn't work, we discovered Olweus and saw that it was an approach that could be used in Adventist schools worldwide. Adventist educators are highly mobile and we wanted a program that worked but that would not have to be reinvented every time educators transitioned form one school to another,” he said.

Worldwide, Adventists operate what may be the second largest parochial school system in the world, with 7,800 schools and colleges, 93,000 teachers and 1,814,000 students.  In North America there are some 848 schools with 4,841 teachers and 51,865 students.

Added Pershing, "We think that the Olweus approach provides an approach to bullying and other negative behaviors that can be used world-wide. We just have to show that it works.  The Minnesota Conference has demonstrated the amazing results that occur when an entire system collaborates and implements the program not just at it's schools, but also in its scouting, children's ministries and summer camp programs."

The subject of bullying, particularly among school peers, has received much attention in recent years from legislators and the media. In October 2006, Pacer’s National Bullying Prevention Center initiated October as National Bullying Prevention Awareness Month, now recognized by schools and communities around the world, according to Stopbullying.gov, a federal website managed by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. While bullying is not illegal, 49 states have implemented anti-bullying legislation, the website says. Statistics from Stopbullying.gov show that 28 percent of U.S. students in grades 6 – 12 have experienced bullying.

"The temptation for the Adventist educators is to think our great student-teacher ratios and Christian teaching results in little or no bullying occurring in our schools," says Pershing, who is an Adventist educator and the first Adventist educator to become an Olweus trainer.  

"What we didn't know until we read the Olweus research, all of us are wired to engage in bullying behavior when the opportunity presents itself.  For example, the country of Norway called Olweus to help them implement a national bullying prevention program in 1983 after three teens committed suicide as a result of bullying. Olweus conducted research and showed that both the incidence rate of bullying, and the percentage of individuals engaging in bullying behavior, were identical between the large urban schools and the small rural, one-room schools. In fact, in the mid-1980s fully half of all public schools in Norway were one-room schools.

“This data resonates with me as an Adventist educator because the majority of Adventist schools in North America are one to three room schools. This means that we cannot rely on having a great student-teacher ratio. It means we must implement with integrity the systems approach that Olweus research shows works."

Pershing also pointed out that conflict resolution programs, such as peer mediation, and other programs such as anger management, or self esteem training do not work when it comes to reducing bullying behavior. "Bullying behavior is peer abuse and abuse processes require intervention by authority. Once authority has intervened and laid a foundation for preventing abuse, then peer-to-peer conflict resolution can work. But it is always the duty of the adults to intervene in peer abuse."

The Center for Conflict Resolution at La Sierra University was established in 2012 and offers adult conflict resolution training, mediation services in addition to the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program training.