Today is Pink Shirt Day, an anti-bullying awareness campaign that encourages kindness and acceptance.
Students at Chris Hadfield Public School in Bradford donned their pink hued shirts on Wednesday and participated in teacher and student led anti-bullying activities throughout the day.
The school has an Awareness Committee that makes a point to recognize awareness campaigns that affect students in the school community.
Josie Bailey, one of the Educational Assistants at the school, is one of the group facilitators who helps students put together campaigns and activities at the school.
"We go through a list (of awareness days) that has been recognized by the (school) board and go through it and see what we can do," she explained.
"They're very good leaders," she explained about the current committee, made up of about 12 students in Grades 6-8.
For Pink Shirt Day, students on the committee spent time during their recess breaks to organize and decorate a 'Lift Each Other Up' themed bulletin board.
On the board in the front hallway was a pink hot hot air balloon, with sticky notes stuck around it filled with positive, inspirational and kind messages. Beside the board was a desk with the sticky notes and pens, inviting passerbyers to stop and fill out their own uplifting message.
Dean Campbell and Katie Centracchio's Kindergarten class partnered with Andrea Gayapersad's Grade 3 classes to create 'kindness clips,' clothespins decorated by the students with colourful markers with positive messages written on them. The students took the clips and walked around the school, attaching them to other students backpacks hung out in the hallways.
Students in Jessica Mackenzie's Grade 5/6 class participated in an interactive learning activity which required them to colour a cut out of a pink shirt, then listen to a story on bullying. Each time they heard one of the characters being bullied in the story, they were told to crinkle a piece of their paper shirt. At the end of the story, they opened up their crinkled shirt, and tried to smooth out the kinks. The kinks were to represent the effects of bullying, showing how hard they can be to iron out.
Pink Shirt Day originally started in Nova Scotia in 2007, after a Grade 9 boy was bullied for wearing a pink shirt to school. Two Grade 12 students had witnessed what was happening and decided to hand out pink shirts for students to wear in solidarity with the bullied teen. The act of kindness was contagious, with countries all over the world celebrating Pink Shirt Day, standing up against bullying.
