Sign goodbye to start with hello
As you may or may not know, depending on if you listen to the announcements, Sept. 25-28 marked the first Start With Hello campaign in Hoban’s history.
For those of you who don’t listen to the announcements, the Start With Hello campaign originated from the Sandy Hook Promise organization. The point of the campaign? “To create a culture of inclusion and connectedness, and encourage [students] to reach out to and include those who may be dealing with chronic social isolation.”
Sounds like a grand idea, doesn’t it? In theory, yeah, it does. A campaign meant to include everyone and stop bullying, in fact, it sounds perfect.
Alas, when implemented in a real world situation, this campaign falls short.
The campaign aims to stop social isolation and, as such, stop students from becoming school shooters. The main flaw in this plan is the assumption that school shooters are all lonely, bullied kids.
The stereotype of the trench coat and black nail polish wearing kid, with a worn out copy of “Catcher in the Rye” and no friends infiltrates every representation of a school shooter in media. History, however, directly contradicts this.
Over the last 30 years, 90% of school shooters have been white males. White males also make up the least bullied group in high schools.
Clearly, school shooters aren’t born out of bullying. That being said, any attempt to stop bullying, whether it stops school shooters or not, has to be good, right?
Wrong. The idea of the Start With Hello campaign is, in my opinion, far more alienating that uniting. For the campaign to function, person A must assume that person B is both lonely and looking for company. Then, person A has to make person B aware of the aforementioned assumption of loneliness.
I couldn’t even list all of the ways this interaction could end poorly, for both point of views.
Still, I’m sure that very interaction has made someone across the country a new friend. That alone gives the Start With Hello campaign some merit.
I still have one major issue though, and it falls solely on Hoban’s shoulders. Why this campaign? As I mentioned earlier, anti-bullying campaigns don’t do anything to stop school shooters and this specific campaign holds its own flaws.
Sept. 24-29 was also Deaf Awareness Week. It’s a week devoted to celebrating the deaf community and bringing awareness to all of the deaf children who grow up without a language because they are born to hearing parents.
What makes a flawed anti-bullying campaign more important than raising awareness for an entire community that is constantly ostracized?
September is also Childhood Cancer Awareness Month and National Preparedness Month. I’m not arguing that the Hoban administration need to make us aware of every single social campaign that occurs, I’m just wondering if maybe they could make better choices about which ones they do share.
