| News | Go Fourth March / Providence Journal |
BYLINE: MARK ARSENAULT
DATE: 03-05-2002
PUBLICATION: Providence Journal Company
EDITION: All
SECTION: NEWS
PAGE: B-01
Joining other students from around the
world, they walk a mile at Rocky Hill School as part of a pledge to end teasing.
WARWICK - Ed Silvia's report cards were heavy with A's and B's until sixth grade, he says. Then he became the object of relentless teasing at school. He was called queer and sissy and things like that, he says. Silvia's grades plummeted with his self-esteem, and he developed a stutter. "It affected my whole life," he says. Silvia, now 50, says he eventually turned to alcohol, and then struggled with substance abuse that dogged him into middle age. He has been sober 10 years, he says. He was at Rocky Hill School yesterday for the "Go Fourth" one- mile march to end teasing, a program dreamed up at Rocky Hill last year and which has now spread across the world. Silvia, of Jamestown, learned about the program from a newspaper, and then called the school to ask if he could attend. Just to watch. "I thought that maybe this would be a good way to put a little closure to that chapter and move on," he says.
The Go Fourth program began with fourth-grade teacher Mary Wright. Her class wrote to students around the globe and persuaded pupils from Providence to Arizona, to Russia, China and Romania, to walk a mile yesterday as part of a pledge to end teasing. Wright estimated that 300 children participated around the globe. About a hundred children walked yesterday at Rocky Hill, including students visiting from Community Preparatory School in Providence. They walked through the school's bayside meadows, among sugar maples tapped for their sap.
Fifth grader Rebecca Miller is 11. She has a few freckles and
a ponytail, and she made the march with an untied sneaker. She explains the
program this way: "It's like when a kindergartner throws pebbles in a pond
to watch the reaction." Kindness ripples.
Rebecca stops to help up a kindergarten girl a miniature of herself who had
fallen on the dry grass. "Everybody gets teased," she says. And everybody
has teased, including her. "Sometimes our insecurities show. It's a small
school but it seems so big when you're in it.
"Our school is pretty good about teasing," she says. "We didn't
have a lot, but I think it has decreased." Kids who start mean-spirited
teasing are quicker to stop, she says. And their peers are quick to stop them.
Wright, the teacher who began the program, says she was harshly teased as a schoolgirl. She has no tolerance for teasing as a teacher. "I went back to my class reunion and I felt stronger because I had done something to help in an area I felt inadequate in before," she says. "I confronted some people, and I felt popular."
Yesterday's march blended into a ceremony in the school gymnasium for world peace, led by members of the New York-based World Peace Prayer Society, a nonprofit organization affiliated with the United Nations.
"In order for children to understand this abstract concept of peace, you have to bring it home to them, to something that is a part of their lives," Wright says. "Teasing is part of their lives. As one of my students said, 'Isn't war just grown-up teasing?'" Students held flags from 191 nations and repeated the universal prayer for peace, written by a Japanese philosopher after World War II: "May peace prevail on Earth." Then they dedicated an 8-foot "peace pole" on which the one sentence message of peace is written in eight languages. It will be permanently placed in the campus quad, and rededicated to world peace every Sept. 11.
Ed Silvia hung around after the ceremony to get a picture with Mary Wright. He seemed in a good mood. "It's so good to be alive, and to be around to address this stuff. And not to be ashamed of it, and to see what tomorrow brings."