Communities in Schools May 2015
Posted by Valerie Ingram
on Apr 20, 2016
News from Communities In Schools May 2016
Prepared for La Rueda
May 2016
How did Los Payasos (the clowns) solve a bullying problem? Los Payasos is one of the creative ways Communities In Schools (CIS) site coordinators address serious problems in their schools. Before we finish the tale of the clowns, we want to update the Rotary Club on this year’s accomplishments, made possible, in part, through a grant from the Rotary Club of Santa Fe Foundation.
CIS site coordinators worked with more than 5,100 students and their families in ten public schools to ensure that students have the support they need to arrive at school rested, nourished and ready to learn. To date, 511 of those students received individualized case management services which ranged from arranging tutoring or counseling to matching families with basic needs services. One hundred of your neighbors volunteered as tutors to support these students academically. We will provide a final report for this school year later this summer which will include our statistics on student progress.
A story about the work CIS site coordinators do to support students comes from Dan Marotta, the coordinator at Kearney Elementary. Two sixth grade boys talked to Dan about another student in their class who was bullying them. Dan investigated by going to eat lunch with this small bilingual class which has only eleven students, five of whom are boys.
After watching how the boys interacted with each other, Dan talked privately with the boy who seemed to be the main bully. “He broke down crying in my office, saying he thought about his actions when he got home,” Dan reported. This boy said he didn’t know how to make friends, and that he felt bad that some of the kids would no longer eat lunch with him.
Dan responded by creating a boys’ group for these five students that meets once a week during lunch. “The boys aired their grievances and apologized to each other. We discussed how to make friends and what it is that makes a good friend,” Dan said. “The goal is not for these boys to become best friends, and I constantly remind them of that. Because their class is so small and they spend all day with each other they have to learn how to treat each other with fairness and respect. According to them, the class has been much better since the group started.”
After the positive outcome of the group’s first meeting, Dan suggested that the group should have a name. “We sat there in silence, until finally one of them spoke up. ‘Los Payasos’ he said, and they all laughed. I asked for the translation, and they told me it means ‘the clowns.’ I don’t think there’s a more fitting name for us.”
The mission of Communities In Schools New Mexico at Santa Fe is to surround students with a community of support, empowering them to stay in school and achieve in life.