St. Albert students put a figurative torch to bullying this week to mark Pink Shirt Day.
Feb. 26 was Pink Shirt Day in Canada, a national event that encouraged people to wear pink as part of a symbolic stand against bullying.
In addition to wearing pink shirts, the 270-some students at École Secondaire Sainte Marguerite d’Youville went a step further by lighting some 300 strips of flash paper on fire Wednesday as part of an anti-bullying demonstration. Appropriately, this demo coincided with Ash Wednesday.
Student Stephanie Blouin said she and about 23 other grade 7 and 8 students in the school’s English Language Enhanced Academic Program got the idea for this display last November as part of a national videoconference on bullying that saw them come up with an anti-bullying project.
The ESSMY team decided to focus on the insecurities everyone had that were behind bullying, Blouin said.
“One kid suggested we should light something on fire,” she said, and their teacher noted they could use flash paper.
Last week, the team had students write down something they were insecure or had been bullied about on a strip of flash paper, Blouin said. The team collected the strips and placed them in a special chimney Wednesday for district chaplain Doug Kramer to light on fire.
“Everyone has things they don’t like about themselves,” Blouin said, and bullying spreads those feelings of insecurity.
By having all these papers piled up and vanished at once, the team hoped to symbolically cleanse everyone of these sources of anxiety and show there is no point in being a bully if everyone has something they could be bullied about.
The papers ignited about a half-second after Kramer dropped a lit match onto them, creating a gout of orange flame about 1.5 m high, the heat of which could be felt from at least five meters away. Excited gasps and applause from the crowd followed.
“That was a lot of fire!” said Kramer, who said he had not expected a fireball of that size.
“So much fire!”
Kramer said he hoped this demonstration would show students the importance of supporting each other instead of weighing each other down with bullying.
“We can choose to lift each other up or we can choose to put each other down, and when we choose to lift each other up, we can wipe out our insecurities.”
Blouin said it would be cool if the school were to do this event again for next year’s Pink Shirt Day.
