Cheryl Conroy
GEAR UP Coordinator – Alachua County School Board
(Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs) is a
project funded by the federal government to help middle and high school
students prepare for college. The goal of GEAR UP is to increase the number
of students who attend college and succeed. Starting with 6th graders,
during the 1999-2000 school year, students at Howard Bishop and Abraham
Lincoln Middle Schools will have GEAR UP services available to them. The
services offered by the GEAR UP program include mentoring, tutoring,
counseling, parent workshops, after school programs, and field trips. GEAR
UP will track students each year through middle and high school, adding new
sixth grade classes to the program each consecutive year.
Cheryl Conroy has been professionally involved in education for 25 years.
Her experience ranges from preschool programs to adult education.
Working as a volunteer at an elementary school in Hawaii she observed the
behavior of children doing the routine activities of the school day.
Fighting and pushing was typical of the behavior that children exhibited in
the various situations they encountered. Based on these observations Ms.
Conroy realized that the central problem was that the children were not
“emotionally literate.” She defined “emotional literacy” as knowing how to
maneuver through the world without violence. The solution she visualized
was to develop a curriculum to teach children the emotional and behavioral
“tools” to relate to other people and empathize with their needs and express
their own needs as well. The problem was that the children did not have a
model for this behavior and were therefore unable to practice.
This more understanding attitude toward dealing with violent behavior is the
basis of the Second Step program. Everyone working with children including
parents should be trained in problem solving, empathy, and anger
management. Even empathy can be taught. The great value in the program
is the prevention of problems before they occur, before children become
involved in violent behavior or crime and wind up in the juvenile justice
system.
Ms. Conroy found that when she engaged the children in discussion about
their playground conflicts that, rather than resistance, the children were
actually eager to discuss and try to understand their problems the
appropriateness of their behavior. This strategy was more successful for
dealing with these problems than the authoritarian approach that was
typically used by other teachers, ministers, and other people in charge of
children’s activities.
Despite the value of the Second Step and other programs Gov. Bush has been
working to cut funding for mental health programs for children. The
Department of Juvenile Justice has moved violence prevention programs to a
lower priority.
There was also some discussion of the reasons for the increased incidence of
gun violence in schools. Some of the possibilities proposed were:
increased access to guns, particularly among white, middle and upper class
children; increased population and even the tension that results from more
people per square mile; and copy cat and publicity seeking behavior. Lack
of newspaper coverage of school violence in previous decades may make the
current upsurge appear more novel than it actually is; newspapers did not
consider such incidences newsworthy.