STOP the Violence is a program that provides students with tools that can be used to create projects that address the specific needs of an individual school. Even schools within a few blocks of one another have different cultures and different needs. Students learn practical skills to recognize, intervene, and stop violence. The types of violence issues discussed ranged from bullying and verbal abuse to high school shootings. The students are taking the training skills they learned at this session and returning to their home states to train high school students, who in turn will create and implement programs relevant to problems in their own schools.
Students can use the skills they learn to set up a peer intervention or mediation program.
When students are having a problem with one another they can meet together and try to work it out before it escalates into violence. If peer mediation doesn't work and it looks like things are getting out of hand, then they can get the adults involved. We are logically the ones who will put an end to violence in our own high schools. After the school shooting in Paducah, KY, high school student Amanda Woodruff of Gettysburg, PA rededicated herself to ending school violence. We are very serious about making a real change.