By Scott Mitchell Johnson
Staff Writer
PRESQUE ISLE, Maine — While blue and white may be SAD 1’s school colors, it was a sea of pink last Friday at Presque Isle Middle School as students wore shirts in support of International STAND UP to Bullying Day.
The school’s Civil Rights Team asked students and staff to wear pink to show others that bullying behaviors are not accepted at PIMS.
“This was a way to stand up to bullying and tell people to stop,” said sixth-grader William Bridges, a member of the Civil Rights Team. “It’s also a way to tell people that they’re OK if they do get bullied.
“This is a good project and I hope the school does it next year,” he said. “Bullying is really big in school; I’ve been bullied and I’ve seen it, so this is a good way to draw attention to the issue.”
International STAND UP to Bullying Day was started as a way to honor two Canadian students who, in 2007, took a stance against bullying at their Cambridge, Nova Scotia school.
A freshman at Central Kings Rural High School wore a pink polo shirt on his first day of school and bullies harassed the boy for wearing pink and threatened to beat him up. Seniors David Shepherd and Travis Price heard about the victim’s plight and decided to do something about it.
They went to a local department store and bought every pink shirt they could find, and then went online to e-mail classmates to wear pink the next day. When they got to school the next day they handed out all of the pink shirts, plus tons of kids were wearing their own pink attire. Since then, Shepherd and Price have been featured on MTV, “Dateline NBC” and the “CBS News.”
Thousands of schools, workplaces and other organizations representing more than 1 million people have since taken a stand against bullying by wearing pink.
“When I first heard about the idea, I thought it was really cool,” said Skyler McAtee, an eighth-grader at PIMS. “It shows that people can stand up for others. I wasn’t really sure how many people would wear pink today, so I was really surprised to see how many have pink shirts on. Some of the people that you wouldn’t think would do it, did it, especially the boys.”
Bridges said he had no qualms about wearing pink.
“I was on board with it from the beginning,” he said. “I had to go out and buy a shirt for today because I didn’t have one. A lot of my friends — both boys and girls — are wearing pink and I’m glad we did.”
For more information about International STAND UP to Bullying Day, log onto www.standupday.com.
