Sexual Harassing No Joke at School
An 8th-grade project turns into new rules
Catcalls will get your parents called.
So will dirty notes and lewd staring.
Groping, or one too many crude comments, means in-school
suspension.
These are the new rules of sexual harassment for
students at
Avondale Middle School, as developed by Maria Kopicki’s
eighth-grade class.
Come fall, what started as a project in civic policy
making will
be the policy of the middle school. The policy
replaces vague
school guidelines based on state laws and commonly
found in
school handbooks.
The eighth-grade students started with the rules in
their school
handbook, and launched into a discussion of the sometimes
fuzzy line between joking and harassment.
“We asked ourselves, ‘Am I making fun of somebody or
am I
sexually harassing them?’ ” 14-year-old Eric Sieh
said Tuesday.
“We asked ourselves ‘What is sexual harassment?’ A
lot of the
rules just weren’t clear.”
The Avondale School Board is considering adopting the new
policy district-wide, for all 3,600 of its students
and seven
schools. Next week, the policy will be judged by
legislators and
educators in a national middle school project
competition in Las
Vegas.
The attention doesn’t surprise Kopicki’s kids. Their assignment
was, in short, to “change the world.” Taking cues
from real-life
cases involving President Bill Clinton and their
peers as
examples, the group of 14-year-olds decided that what
constitutes sexual harassment is often unclear.
“It’s a topic that people have faced in our school
and it’s
something we saw the president dealing with,” said Candace
Creech, now 15. “It’s something that you begin to
deal with in
middle school, I guess.”
In fact, administrators say that was the case this
past school
year, when three Avondale Middle School boys were
suspended for verbally sexual harassing a girl.
It got the students’ attention, and many were
surprised the
punishment was so severe.
According to the Oakland Intermediate School
District, each
school has the authority to develop its own policy,
and usually
bases it on state guidelines.
“It was an awakening for these kids,” said Avondale Middle
School principal Derrick Fries, who prefers the
students’ more
comprehensive policy — the old one more broadly defined
harassment.
“It’s important for kids at this age not to
underestimate what
affect even their words can have on another person.
It’s part of
learning and growing up, and this is the time for it.”
Creech, along with 25 other students, researched the
topic on
the Internet and at the library to see what works in
other states.
Using a curriculum provided by Project Citizen, a national
civics program funded by the Department of Education and
available to all school districts, the students also
learned how to
sell their ideas.
After winning over school administrators, they made a public
presentation to the school board.
“The goal is to show them they can change things,” Kopicki
said.
“These kids can think on such a higher level if you
give them
the opportunity. Yes, it’s a controversial issue, but
look at what
they did with it.”
The students split sexual harassment into three
levels: mild,
moderate and severe.
Mild includes whistling, catcalls, deliberate staring
and dirty
jokes.
Moderate is defined as joking about sexual
orientation, repeated
vulgar comments and unwanted touching of clothes or
body.
Severe includes grabbing, stalking, groping and
making threats.
They then assigned punishments. For example, mild verbal
harassment results in a meeting with parents and administrators
to decide on punishment or counseling. Verbal or physical
pressure for sexual activity results in a suspension
and a
possible police report.
“It’s a good feeling seeing our work go this far,”
said Sieh,
who spent many hours trying to come to a consensus
with his
classmates on subjects like pornography.
“Some of those conversations were pretty interesting.
There are
still a lot of things open for interpretation, and
then we started to
get into racial harassment. But we decided to leave
that one for
the next class.”
For more information about Project Citizen, phone the Center
for Civic Education at 1-800-350-4223 or visit their
Web site
at www.civiced.org.