Bullying can impact individuals in any environment, but it can be particularly devastating in an educational setting. Students and a school librarian in Montana decided to address the issue directly with help from an American Library Association (ALA) grant.
“We began our work with the anti-bullying concept with a club at our school that meets weekly in the school library, called the Democracy Project,” says Alia Hanson, teacher-librarian at Columbia Falls (Mont.) High School. The club supplies students with resources to meet community needs while learning about their role in an evolving democracy. Hanson says students in the group identified bullying as a problem at the school, particularly towards those with disabilities, with some being part of what Hanson calls “a nasty bullying cycle.”
The students initially sponsored a school-wide bullying awareness day but went on to demonstrate an interest in accessing additional resources that might allow them to make the kind of cultural changes they wanted at the high school, Hanson says.
“They wanted things like direct kindness instruction, afterschool programming, and school-wide work on anti-bullying,” she explains.
Hansons says that ALA’s Libraries Transforming Communities (LTC): Accessible Small and Rural Communities grant was a good match to support some larger goals about cultural change at the high school. The grant helps small and rural libraries increase the accessibility of facilities, services, and programs to better serve people with disabilities.
The school used most of the grant’s $20,000 to staff after-school programming, with a portion being used for school-wide education on positive psychology, brain development, and bullying awareness.
The grant’s education component was facilitated by a partnership with mental wellness organization Nate Chute Foundation (NCF), which supports, educates, and empowers communities with mental wellness and suicide prevention initiatives.
“NCF has provided quite a bit of wellness and mental health training, including the opportunity to attend annual wellness consortiums for area high schools, training on the Happiness Project from the University of Montana [which promotes meaningful, well-lived lives], and creating a student wellness club,” she says.
For the grant’s afterschool program component, the school partnered with its Student and Family Advocate/Homeless Liaison and the Boys & Girls Club to provide tutoring and programming.
“We have tutoring twice weekly,” Hanson says. “And once a week, we offer Magic (The Gathering), arts and crafts, and Dungeons and Dragons [activities].”
The LTC grant has allowed Columbia Falls High School students to have an active voice in confronting bullying while showing them the impact of a school library.
“The students definitely feel more connected to each other and the library,” Hanson happily reports. “Students who are otherwise outcast and awkward have a safe place to gather and a group to belong to. They’re learning how to communicate, make friends, and attend to their mental health.”
Since 2014, ALA has distributed LTC funding to foster community engagement skills among library workers and support need-driven projects.The LTC: Accessible Small and Rural Communities initiative has offered more than $14 million in grants to small and rural libraries to increase the accessibility of facilities, services, and programs to better serve people with disabilities. To be eligible, a library must have a legal area population of 25,000 or less and be located at least five miles from an urbanized area, in keeping with the Institute of Museum and Library Services definitions of small and rural libraries. LTC: Accessible Small and Rural Communities grants are offered in partnership with the Association for Rural & Small Libraries.
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Bill Furbee is a writer living in Kentucky.
Photos courtesy of Columbia Falls High School
