Head Girl Calls on Peers to Care for Others

As efforts continue to discourage bullying among school children, one student leader is calling on her peers to put great emphasis on care and understanding for others.

Making the call, Head Girl at the St. Catherine based Greater Portmore High School, Sashneik Nicholson, said if every person seeks to treat others how they would want to be treated, and appreciates that they are not responsible for how they were born, the challenge can be erased.

“Not everybody has the same privileges like you. Not everybody has the same things as you. Not everybody lives the same life as you. So, you might have something, and somebody else does not. You might have been born with something, and somebody else has not been born with that. So, everybody is unique in their own way, and that person is just different from you,” she said during an interview with JIS News.

Sashneik said that in a world where everyone is the same, “it would be so boring,” arguing that everybody has to have their own characteristic traits, and their own physical traits.

“Everybody cannot be the same. So, do not bully somebody else for being different,” she urged.

Noting that there is excessive time on social media platforms by students around her, she said it is affecting academic performance by the students, and there are “behavioural issues as well.”

The Head Girl said her school has a policy that “we should not carry our phones on the school grounds. So, if we should carry our phones, they are supposed to be left at a guidance counsellor’s office, or they should be left with a trusted teacher.”

She said that the use of cellular phones during school hours to record dances or used as a means of bullying and to spread rumours about people, must be discouraged, and instead, the “information right at our fingertips (on the phone), use the information that we have at our hands for good.”

“People before us usually had to go to the libraries and look in books in order to study or find information. We can, just with the tap of our finger, find the information. You can go on Google Chrome, and it is a website that you can access to find different books – you have every single book available on that website that you would need to pass your exams,” she said.

The Ministry of Education, Youth and Information emphasises prevention, reporting, and intervention through initiatives like the 2015 Revised Safety and Security Manual, which provides guidelines for schools on documenting and addressing bullying incidents, and the development of a multi-sectoral approach to violence and child abuse.

It mandates that all schools provide a safe, dignified, and respectful environment, free from all forms of bullying and intimidation, regardless of a student’s background, and promotes a proactive approach to safety and security, incorporating measures to address bullying and other challenges in schools.