Middle School Student Projects Receive Grant Awards
Five grant awards were recently announced for middle school students from Fernandina Beach, Yulee, Callahan and Hilliard. The grant project topics include drunk driving, cyberbullying and underage drinking. The different project designs include a play, a school-wide campaign and a survey for community leaders. The grant objectives are service learning and community involvement.
The FBMS 8th Grade Drama Group STARZ!! will perform a play entitled “The Waiting Room” for Nassau County sixth graders.
FBMS Drama Instructor Judy Tipton will direct the play, which features characters who died as victims of drunk driving. These children find themselves in some kind of waiting room from which they overhear a conversation between a woman and her drunk husband. They realize in horror that the man is planning to get behind the wheel of a car and that others will be in danger if he isn’t stopped. Mrs. Tipton says, “This short play strikes hard at the emotions, and it is most effective when followed by actual case histories and statistics.”
Social studies students of Barbara Mickle at Yulee Middle School and Rob Durney at Hilliard Middle Senior High School will also be busy this spring. Along with Callahan Middle School’s Youth Crime Watch Team, led by science teacher Monica Wright, these groups will do selected projects related to cyberbullying. All three of these schools will host student assemblies led by Dr. Sameer Hinduja, author of “Bullying Beyond the Schoolyard: Identifying, Preventing and Responding to Cyberbullying.” After the assemblies, Mickle, Durney and Wright will guide their students in projects to educate others on how to report cyberbullying on myspace, respond as a bystander/victim to cyberbullying, create opportunities for students to report inappropriate on-line behavior, and identify cyberbullying trustees on a school campus.
The STARZ!! play and the cyberbullying projects will be produced with funds from the Corporation for National and Community Service’s Learn & Serve America program and through the Florida Department of Education’s Florida Learn & Serve initiative. These mini-grants are designed to support service-learning projects (projects for which service applies and is a means of learning). All projects must involve students doing service.
The purpose of an additional grant award from the Youth Crime Watch of Florida is to involve youth in creating strategies that limit access to substances; change the culture and contexts within which decisions about substance use are made; and/or to increase the negative consequences associated with use. Youth Crime Watch coordinators Michael Argento from Hilliard Middle Senior High School, Dep. Tracy Osborne from Yulee Middle School and Monica Wright from Callahan Middle School will mentor their teams as they implement an underage drinking project. The students will solicit feedback from community leaders regarding underage drinking laws and violation enforcement through an Alcohol Policy Survey. When the underage drinking project is completed the Youth Crime Watch team members will present their findings to our local drug coalition, the Nassau Alcohol Crime and Drug Abatement Coalition, or NACDAC.
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For more information visit www.fsu.edu/~flserve or contact Kim Clemons, Project Manager, NCSD Office of I&P,
at clemonski@nassau.k12.fl.us.