Knowledge is power and for former NHLer Sheldon Kennedy the crusade is to not only have every youth in Canada empowered with identifying harassment and abuse, but also every Canadian adult.
Kennedy and Respect Group co-founder Wayne McNeil were invited by Canadian Rockies Public Schools (CRPS) to discuss The Respect in Schools Program with CRPS employees on Friday (Jan. 17) at Canmore Collegiate High School. The program is designed to teach and certify employees in how to better understand and thwart bullying, abuse, harassment and neglect among students and youth.
“The acceptance is of the fact that this stuff happens and it happens a lot. I don’t think you can really get into an avenue of change until you have acceptance,” said Kennedy on the need to focus as much education towards the warning signs of abuse on adults as is done with youth.
“Sometimes we just want to be the good parent that says, ‘yeah sure we’ll help,’ but then you find yourself in front of a group of kids and, because you’re in front of that group of kids and we are in kids’ eyes their mentor, we need to understand that and not only know how to protect ourselves, but be able to understand and recognize if a child does disclose (abuse), how to properly handle that.
“A lot of these cases, 80 per cent of them, happen in the home. It’s different if a stranger is hurting a child, but it’s a lot more sensitive within the home and we need to make sure we’re giving people the tools to handle that properly.”
Foothills School Division (FSD) was the first in the province to mandate the program, with CRPS now being the second.
“I think the big reason why we wanted this program was consistency,” said CRPS superintendent Chris MacPhee. “Safe and caring schools is one of the biggest things we want. We want everyone to know where Canadian Rockies Public Schools comes from and in order for us to do that – that consistent language that Sheldon talks about – is extremely important.
“So we have everyone, from custodians, lunchroom supervisors, teachers, bus drivers – everyone here today – and we want our entire staff to have that language and those tools to be able to help if the need arises.
“This school division has been at the forefront of the province when it comes to safe and caring schools with a program such as this and with our procedure on gay, lesbian, bisexual equality – we were the second school division in this province to have an admin procedure approved in that area.”
McNeil and Kennedy both agreed 2014 will involve pushing Respect Group programs across the entire nation.
“We’re talking to the ministry and the more traction we get at the grassroots level seems to help us at the ministry level,” McNeil said. “We’ve done a deal with the Ministry of New Brunswick Education and the Manitoba Ministry of Education and continue talking with Alberta, Ontario and B.C. in the same kind of light to try and make it mandatory across the province.
“My efforts personally are going to be working with school ministries across the country... we’re just trying to leverage it all in the hopes that we get every province,” McNeil said.
CRPS employees will have until the end of May to complete the newly mandated online Respect in Schools Program to receive certification. Visit, www.respectgroupinc.com to learn more about Kennedy and McNeil’s Respect Group programs for sports, school and workplace.
