Earlier this year in opposite sides of Wyoming, students
were overcome with emotion as they explored ways to stop school shootings,
prevent bullying, and keep fellow students from committing suicide.
In Cheyenne,
Mountain View, and Lyman, the program called Rachel’s Challenge enjoyed a huge
success with students, parents, teachers, administrators, and community
members.
With school
shootings rates and teen suicides rates both rising across the country, the
good work being done by Rachel’s Challenge needs to be promoted. Luckily, schools all over Wyoming are
embracing it.
The non-profit
Rachel’s Challenge organization claims that its good work prevents more than
100 suicides a year and has prevented seven school shootings in its 20 years of
existence.
In Cheyenne,
East High students Michelle Puente and Keeley Cleveland promoted the program
after hearing about it. “It’s really inspiring to see you don’t have to do big
things to make a difference,” Michelle was quoted in a Wyoming Tribune-Eagle article.
That article
also reported that East Sophomore Skyler Eidhead, his face blanched and wet
with tears after hearing the program said he recently lost some people close to
him. Hearing Rachel’s story gave him a sense of hope.
Some 20 years
ago, the most publicized school shooting in history occurred at Columbine High
School in Littleton, Colorado. The first student killed was a 16-year old girl named
Rachel Scott. After her death, her
parents found her personal journal predicting her death at a young age and her
hope of ways to help people.
In a school essay titled “My
Ethics, My Codes of Life,” Rachel wrote that she wanted to start a chain
reaction of kindness.
Six weeks later, she was dead, the
first of 13 to be killed during the 1999 Columbine massacre.
For students at Cheyenne’s East
High, who have grown up in an era where school shootings are at the forefront
of national conversation, Rachel’s Challenge brought an unexpected twist to
those discussions.
After Rachel’s death 120 miles
south of Cheyenne in Littleton, her parents, Darrell and Sandy Scott, began
reading through their daughter’s journals and papers, and found proclamations
of kindness and compassion. They were so moved by their daughter’s words they
began speaking to community groups and student organizations on behalf of their
late daughter, using the words she’d put down in her journals as the crux of
their message: kindness.
These speaking occasions grew into
what is now called Rachel’s Challenge, a nonprofit organization that seeks to
share Rachel’s message of kindness with high school students across the
country.
They focus on a few key ideas. They
ask students to fight prejudice, to intervene when somebody is being bullied,
and to look for the best in others. Though inextricably tied to the Columbine
shooting, the presentation hinges less explicitly on school safety and more on
kindness and its byproducts – safer schools among them.
“It’s about students’ hearts and
getting them to that place where they are connected,” said Nate Rees, regional
partnership manager for the group. “A direct result of that is less violence in
schools.”
Rachel’s uncle, Larry Scott, gave
the presentation to East High students Tuesday. He is one of dozens of the
group’s presenters, but unlike most, his own children were inside Columbine
High School at the time of the shooting. They got out unharmed.
In a
description of how this worked in Mountain View, the principal of the school,
Ben Carr, wrote: “Rachel had written
about her desire to reach out and show kindness to everyone, but especially to
three specific groups, including special needs students, students new to the
school, and students being picked on and bullied.”
Carr quoted
Larry Scott: “He said one particular student who was being bullied reached out
to the Scott family to tell them how her kindness and efforts to defend him
were directly responsible for saving his life when he decided not to follow
through on a plan to kill himself.”
State Supt. of Public Instruction,
Jillian Balow, is supportive of the program and has been encouraging schools to
use it to prevent bullying, school shootings, and suicide.
Coincidentally,
the biggest donors to Rachel’s Challenge have been Wyomingites Foster and Lynn
Friess of Jackson. They gave $2.5 million to the program as a matching grant so
more schools can afford to host this amazing program.
Students who
have attended this program in 30 Wyoming schools so far, say it changed their
lives for the better. It makes sense for
all schools to use this program. What a
great message!
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