Students Learn Life Lessons

Amid red, white and blue balloons, noise from 120 kids “honking” drowned out parts of Westminster Mayor Frank Fry Jr.’s speech Wednesday at the 1999 Youth Conference put on by the city and its school district.

But the noise was just goodwill.

The 120 sixth- through eighth-graders attending the third annual leadership conference were taught, among other things, to “honk” when they wanted to signify encouragement and goodwill toward speakers.

“There’s a lot of energy in this room,” Linda Paulsen, principal of Warner Middle School, said as the students tore into their pepperoni pizza lunch.

Fry, one of a number of speakers at the event, said the students should use lessons from the conference to help other students by sharing and practicing their newfound knowledge.

The event is designed to improve relations among students at three middle schools, where rivalries sometimes turn nasty. The students selected to attend the conference are from different socioeconomic backgrounds.

Of the three schools, for instance, Warner has the highest poverty rate among the parents, she said.

Some Warner students are not participating in after-school activities because their parents can’t afford it or don’t have time to drive their children to the events, Paulsen said.

She welcomed the opportunity for children to make new friends outside their schools. “We teach them that we are more alike than different,” Paulsen said.

Paulsen chose 40 students from Warner and three teachers to spend the day in workshops and to listen to guest speakers on such topics as “Making and Keeping Friends,” and “Character Matters.”

What hit Brenda Sexton, a 13-year-old student at Warner, most was hearing about a child in England who had committed suicide because he was teased by other children.

“The more we get together, the more we see we have the same problems to deal with,” she said. “Some of my friends, they didn’t want to go to college, they didn’t care about finishing high school, but their whole mind changed about graduating after this.”

She said it was important students from all three schools attended because rivalries among students is getting worse.

“I’ve seen people fight because of it,” Brenda said. “If you’re at a certain hangout, like the skate rink or the 7-Eleven, people will come up and say, ‘You can’t stay here. You’re from the wrong school.’ ”

Paulsen pointed out how well students got along at the conference. “You don’t see all the white kids at one table and all the cheerleaders at one table, but everyone together,” she said.

The schools will conduct follow-up workshops. At Warner, for instance, teachers will ask participating children to come up with solutions to conflicts and with activities for other students.

“If they go away and say this was fun, we have failed. They should go back and act.”

Brenda hopes more teachers will participate next year. “They need to know there’s sometimes a problem,” she said, “and that the world isn’t perfect.”