Editorial: With the 2014-15 school year getting underway across West Central Alberta, students, teachers and staff are returning to schools in anticipation of productive months of first-class education. For the thousands of students in the Chinook's Edge School Division, the learning experience promises to be filled with high-quality learning opportunities, new and renewed friendships, and interesting and rewarding activities.
Editorial
With the 2014-15 school year getting underway across West Central Alberta, students, teachers and staff are returning to schools in anticipation of productive months of first-class education.
For the thousands of students in the Chinook's Edge School Division, the learning experience promises to be filled with high-quality learning opportunities, new and renewed friendships, and interesting and rewarding activities.
As classes get underway, feelings of positive anticipation are quite rightly first and foremost in students' minds.
Unfortunately, the start of the new school year can also be a time of worry and concern for some students – because of hazing and froshing.
Often taking the form of older students targeting younger students, hazing and froshing can involve minor incidents such as egg throwing. However, as past experiences have shown, hazing and froshing can also sometimes have tragic or even fatal mishaps.
With the widespread realization that the former tolerance for froshing and hazing is now wholly out of date and no longer acceptable, every school board in Alberta has enacted rules banning the activities.
The Chinook's Edge policy states that hazing and froshing are "detrimental to individual students and school climate and are therefore prohibited. The division believes that hazing is an abusive and humiliating activity and expects that students will neither initiate, participate or encourage hazing or froshing.
"Hazing and froshing activities can be defined as those that result in bullying, humiliation or harassment."
Regardless of their grade or age, Chinook's Edge students found to have engaged in hazing and froshing activities face penalties up to and including suspension and expulsion.
As all too many recent cases have shown, student-on-student bullying can lead to long-term problems for the victims, including self-harm or even suicide.
In response, anti-bullying efforts at the school level have increased markedly in recent years, with all stakeholders now acknowledging the terrible harm that bullying can sometimes have on young people.
And since hazing and froshing are quite rightly defined as examples of bullying, those activities are now prohibited, as they should be.
While all Chinook's Edge students will be informed of the division's prohibition on hazing and froshing, some students may decide to ignore the rules.
That is where parents and other caregivers need to step in, making sure that every child under their guidance and care is made fully aware that hazing and froshing activities will not be tolerated.
At the same time, parents, caregivers and the public at large will expect school divisions to vigorously enforce the anti-hazing and anti-froshing rules and penalties now in place.
