Middle School Students Pledge to ‘Delete’ Cyber-Bullying

Students at Fort Lee’s participating in Cablevision’s Power to Learn program took a pledge Tuesday to “delete cyber-bullying,” and one talented eighth-grader at the school recently learned she had won first prize in Cablevision’s anti-cyber-bullying poster contest.

Students filed into the middle school library, table-by-table, during their lunch period Tuesday to take the online pledge with the help of School Library Media Specialist Cean Spahn.

Spahn said anybody can take the pledge, including students and teachers, and that she’s even put up posters at the . The poster has a QR code that can be scanned using a smart phone equipped with a barcode reader that will take you right to the website. Participants enter their first name and school—Lewis F. Cole can be selected from a dropdown menu on the site, for example—and the top 10 schools in the state, in terms of the number of pledges, receive $2,000 to go toward anti-bullying programs, according to Spahn.

“[The pledge] really focuses on not using technology to hurt other people, and then it also talks about not just being a bystander,” said Spahn, who’s also a teacher representative on the middle school’s anti-bullying committee. “That’s a big problem, especially at this age, with kids just kind of standing by and watching what’s happening, or knowing what’s happening and that things are being said about somebody and never saying anything or telling anybody and helping stop it … if we have less bystanders, there will be less bullying in general because the bullies won’t have an audience. Cyber-bullying is obviously a part of that; it’s a big problem.”

The Pledge the students signed onto Tuesday reads as follows:

I Pledge to take a stand against cyberbullying.

I will not use technology as a weapon to hurt others.

I will support others who are being cyberbullied and will include students who are easily left out.

I promise not to be a bystander to other people’s bullying.

I will stand up to and speak out against cyberbullying.

I agree to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

I pledge to help Delete Cyberbullying.

One middle school student, who took the pledge Tuesday, but who also seems to have a pretty good handle on its meaning, is Tiffany Tereshkina. She recently learned that a poster she made in her seventh grade Health class in June had won first prize in Cablevision’s Power to Learn contest.

Now an eighth-grader, Tiffany said she never expected to win, thinking the assignment was “just another class project,” and that some of her classmates’ posters seemed better than hers.

But she said, “it feels wonderful” to have won.

“I realized that mine had good wording in, and I guess that’s why they picked me,” Tiffany said. “Students around the world are being cyber-bullied, and that’s very wrong because it’s actually hurting other people’s feelings. People should realize that words can hurt others by Internet use … you always have to choose your friends wisely and make them trust you.”

For winning first place in the contest, Tiffany received a certificate of recognition from Cablevision and a Microsoft Xbox 360 game console, although she says she’s “not the Xbox type,” and that if her brother is good, she might just give it to him.

“I’m really proud of her; she did a great job,” said middle school principal Rosemary Giacomelli. “She makes good things happen here at the middle school.”

Tiffany was among 30 students from Christine Lepore’s Health class at the middle school who entered a poster in the contest just before school got out in June, Spahn said, adding that bookmarks made from the winning posters, including Tiffany’s, will be distributed throughout the state.

Spahn said the middle school has “been on top of it” when it comes to bullying and cyber-bulling, noting the school’s “Bias Busters,” peer mediators and various assemblies on such topics as “respect” as examples.

“Whether it’s regular bullying or cyber-bullying, it’s kind of something that [Giacomelli] has always taken a stand on and felt very strongly about it,” Spahn said. “She didn’t want it to happen in this school.”