High school students at a Brooklyn school are learning how to intervene when they see bullying and harassment at school and on the streets.
The Academy of Urban Planning and Engineering (AUPE), formerly Bushwick High School, has partnered with anti-bullying nonprofit Right to Be since last September to equip teachers with a curriculum that trains people how to be better bystanders when they witness a situation.
Jorge Sandoval, the principal of AUPE, told amNewYork Metro that partnering with Right to Be was a sensible decision to make after seeing behavioral concerns arise when students returned to in-person classes after the initial peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I had to jump on this opportunity to educate my students so they can make better decisions,” Sandoval said. “It teaches them not to be an aggressor, not to be caught up in the “he said she said,” and not to just react with physicality and words.”
Sandoval said AUPE often uses restorative justice practices to address any situations where negative student behavior is a concern. AUPE is a relatively smaller school of 400 students who are predominantly Latino and Black. About 100 students have already or are currently being taught the bystander intervention training by teachers in their classes.
Right to Be, previously called Hollaback!, started as a conversation between a group of women who all experienced various forms of harassment in the workplaces and streets of New York City. The nonprofit, along with Cornell University, led the largest international study on street harassment in 2015, and from there, the movement has grown as the nonprofit leads bystander intervention trainings for hundreds and thousands of people, including students, every year.
The trainings provide modern-day instruction on how to deal with bullying and harassment for both general audiences and specific communities, including Black, Latinx, Asian, Jewish, Muslim, LGBTQIA+, neurodiverse, and disabled people. The…
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