In a recent PSC parent council meeting, school’s resource officer Const. Glen Wallace of RCMP made a presentation, during which two issues appeared to stand out: use of marijuana and misuse of social media among the students.
Ponoka News interviewed Ponoka Secondary Campus Principal Ian Rawlinson and Assistant Principal Kathy McTaggart on the topic.
Excerpts from the interview:
Ponoka News: What are the dimensions of the two major issues that were discussed during the recent presentation by the school resource officer?
Ian Rawlinson: “Our problem here is not a severe problem, we do have students that bring marijuana and weed to our school for sure, unfortunately that is a problem of our society. Our ability to control the things we do, we do go into lockers, they are our lockers and we have a legal right to go into lockers, we also use our police, but the two can’t conflict.
“So if I find marijuana on a student, my focus as a school administrator is to deal with the student, not necessarily to legally charge them and go through the legal system, However, if the student is bringing an excessive amount of drugs to school or alternatively selling drugs at our school, that’s when we seek expulsion or we go through a different process. That’s how we separate the two. Most of the stuff we deal with is what I would say fairly minor incidents, they would have a joint or half a joint. We do go into lockers, we take an educational approach to it, so it is not you bring a joint and you’re done and thrown into jail. Our job is to educate.
“In that regard, what we do is we allow them access, we have an ADAC counsel that comes in, we mandate mandatory counseling to students quite often, we obviously bring in parents to educate parents. Our hope is to make the student to understand that this is not acceptable behaviour and if that doesn’t work, then ultimately the consequences escalate…”
Kathy McTaggart: “To me that (misuse of social media) is the bigger issue in that it is really hard to control that. That’s something we have a lot of issues brought to us that happens outside the school and that’s where we use our social worker and bring together all the affected students and talk it out.
“When it comes to us, it is usually “this person is bullying me”, we try to get to the bottom of it, figuring out if it is a case of bullying or it is a case of all parties involved going back and forth. Most often, it turns into “I can’t say you’re bullying” or “I would suspend you both” because the kids go back and forth with it, then we have a meeting with all the kids involved and our school social worker to discuss “why are you guys doing all this?” or “why are you making decisions to say this stuff over social media?” and then kids have to talk face to face.
Ian Rawlinson “It is the old school; it is very easy to say something over social media, it is almost anonymous, you can be actually anonymous, at the end of the day we feel it is important for them to sit around the table because this is how they are going to have deal with it as adults.
“Marijuana is not the largest issue, nor is alcohol abuse and I would say our school and most schools in Alberta would deal with those things but we can educate our kids and work with them over those issues. The tougher one for is the social media one.
“Because there are so many avenues, the minute they feel hurt, they want to act out, they can do it anywhere anytime, it is immediate. But I think this is a society issue, this is a society problem and I would say that it is consuming more and more of our time.
“But it is important for your readers to understand that we’ve had situations over the Facebook and over other social media when kids themselves started to make comments to other kids, saying this is inappropriate and take this garbage out of here and they have started to self-correct.”