Students were encouraged to wear orange, the color that represents anti-bullying.

“All of October we try to focus on that. I try to pump it up. I tell our high schoolers, ‘You are the leaders of the school, you wearing orange is really important,'” said Rebecca Kelley, school guidance counselor, who has been organizing the program for the past three years. She involves students in all grades in activities throughout the month.

“My theme this year is ‘one in every five kids is bullied, five out of five can prevent that,’ so let’s identify those kids in the school,” she said.

She had forms for each middle school and high school student. They nominated classmates. Students selected as “upstanders” received an orange T-shirts that states, “I am one of the five out of five.”

The Garden of Hope, created with paper hands cut out by elementary students and covered with anti-bullying messages. (Submitted photo)

“They could fill it out anonymously, but they had to give me examples of how this person is an ‘upstander’ — how they demonstrate kindness and integrity,” Kelley said.” I think they did overall a pretty good job of picking kids who are kind and would go out of their way to make sure someone is OK.”

Each year, she tries to do different activities so that it doesn’t become redundant. This year, children in kindergarten through second grade read the book “Zink the Zebra,” about a zebra that is born with spots instead of stripes.

“The story explains that even though we may be different, we are all more alike than we are different,” Kelley said.

The students colored pictures of Zink and hung them in the school.

Third and fourth graders, and some second graders, traced their hands on orange paper and cut them out.

A closeup to the T-shirt given to Florence County students selected by their peers as “upstanders” against bullying. (Submitted photo)

“The kids wrote down ways they could contribute to preventing bullying. Out of the cut out hands we made a ‘Garden of Hope,'” Kelley said.

Fifth and sixth graders were divided into small groups to create posters.

“I think sometimes there’s misconceptions about bullying, so I try to explain to kids what bullying is. It’s not necessarily that someone doesn’t want to play with you. I’ve been talking a lot this year about boundaries, where does the solution lie, and it really lies with the kids. I talked to them about drawing clear boundaries with kids and liking who you are, because then people can say whatever they want. You choose good friends, choose friends who you know are good to you and create those boundaries,” Kelley said.

“It’s something I came across and I think it’s super-important to pay attention to bullying,” she added. “That’s one thing we still need to talk about, because we’re part of the solution, too.”

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Marguerite Lanthier can be reached at 906-774-3500, ext. 85242, or mlanthier@ironmountaindailynews.com.