Fourteen staff members undertook three-day training for the Safeteen Program, which School District 72 will fully implement in the 2024/25 school year, universally within the district.
“It’s a very expensive program but it’s a very valuable program,” says Associate Superintendent Morgan Kyle during the district’s Feb. 6 board meeting. “We got a grant from the Ministry of Public Health and so we used that grant to pay for training.”
Originally a program developed to teach school girls self-defence in the Vancouver School District, it has morphed into a skill-based violence program focusing on teaching students to manage emotions and diffuse situations that could lead to using self-defence.
The Safeteen training program covered topics such as power dynamics of violence, healthy relationships, compassionate assertiveness, mindful and non-reactive strategies, bully prevention and bystander skills, gender roles and stereotypes, sexual consent, transforming fear and anger, social media and its impact, and sexual harassment and sexual assault prevention.
Three staff members sent to the training were at the meeting to talk about their experience, Alana Thompson, Maya Saxby-Jones, and Dylan Grier. Thompson is a youth care worker at Southgate Middle School, Grier is a teacher at Ecole Phoenix, and Saxby-Jones is also employed by Ecole Phoenix as a counsellor.
READ MORE: No cell phone bans for School District 72, but there will be boundaries
“A big piece (of the program) is validating feelings in our youth and explaining both in males and females that every feeling they have is okay, it’s a matter of what you do with those feelings,” says Thompson.
The training focuses on breaking down harmful concepts and “unwritten rules” children are taught since birth by society, such as traditional gender roles, and how to talk about it to youth to help them change and challenge these roles while in a comfortable and safe setting.
For example, Thompson talks about how girls are often taught to become passive, not to take up space, nurturing, be nice and polite, and make room for bigger voices in the room. Instead, with the help of the Safeteen training, educators and counsellors can help young girls be assertive, something Thompson says they aren’t usually told is okay.
A lot of the training in the workshop was delivered through role-playing exercises and split up by gender.
“We talked a lot about worrying that we do split up the groups between male-bodied people and female-bodied people,” says Thompson. “That was something we brought forward right away because of our confusion around inclusion in schools, but the reason they do that is to create a safe place for specifically females or female-bodied people to share their own experiences in a safe place without judgement and a space where they can be their assertive self and take up that room that they deserve.”
Safeteen is woven together with some other district programs dealing with social and emotional learning and sexual education, such as Second Step, Mental Health framework, PreVenture, and PE sexual health curriculum.
“We got lots of things going on,” says Kyle. “The reason we shared what’s already going on is making sure this is all woven together, particularly around consent which is a ministry focus for us and that is a way to possibly to do that.”
