Stick Together

Get a group of friends and classmates to become your committee for the Violence Awareness Week. A committee is important because there are other thoughtful opinions for you to consider when making decisions. Then, visit your principal or some teachers to find out what types of things you can do for this campaign. Can you put posters up all over school? Hold an assembly? Pass out materials to students?

Action, Action! We want action

With help from your committee, decide on specific dates and a plan of action for the week. It would be a good idea to have a certain event or anti-violence theme every day. Some ideas for your week are:

• Make announcements with startling school violence stats over the loudspeaker every morning
• Dedicate each day to a different issue relating to violence like dating violence, gun violence, bullying, verbal abuse, etc. Make posters for each day and place them all over the school. For example, you could make posters explaining all the different types of bullying (like cyber, verbal, physical, etc). Posters should be eye catching and should include a short phrase that gets your point across.
• If you can have an assembly at the end of the week, it might be fun to get your classmates interested by passing out little sheets of paper with interesting questions about school violence that will be answered at the end of the week during the assembly.
  
  Another thing you could do is ask classmates to research the answers to the questions and everyone who finds the right answers to every question (all 7 days of the week) will win a prize after the answers are revealed at the assembly.
• Pass out a sheet with resources for help with any school violence issue. These could be hotlines, websites, or even books. It’s good to teach your friends about school violence; it’s even better to let them know where to find help.
• Search out good speakers for a possible assembly at the end of the week. Need help finding speakers? Click here.

Go For the Gold

Now that you have it all on paper, go ahead and start making those posters and flyers. Start researching those facts and get ready to teach your peers about school violence.

Results

It's great to get people thinking about school violence, but you should take your Violence Awareness Week one step further. The following week, pass around a "What did you learn" questionnaire to measure just how successful your week was. This will be important info to use if you have another similar event next year.

You could also start a school club focused on raising awareness of school violence as well as counseling peers who are bullies or those who have been bullied. Get a guidance counselor to help you with this.