Challenge Day, NAPT and Transfinder Want You ...
To Join the War on Bullying

Industry alliance to challenge industry conference attendees
to end bullying at their schools

For Mike Martin, like many of those involved in bringing the Challenge Day anti-bullying program to the National Association for Pupil Transportation’s conference in Myrtle Beach, S.C., this month, the war on bullying has personal stakes.
Martin knew bullying was one of the core problems facing the industry from the time he became involved with NAPT in the early 1990s. Still, despite being NAPT’s executive director, he didn’t let anyone know until recently that he was bullied as a child.

“It just wasn’t something I was capable of sharing,” he said. “I’ve come a long way, and we’ve all come a long way in acknowledging that we have a huge problem. But we still have to come together to fight that.”

Presenting Challenge Day to the conference attendees may be the opening salvo to that fight.

Since its founding two decades ago, more than 100,000 students in 1,000 schools have gone through the day-long program. Students participate in exercises to show them they are not as different as they might think.

In the popular “Power Shuffle,” participants are asked to cross a line at the center of the room, first if they’ve ever been harassed because they are female, then if they’ve been teased because of their race, then if they’ve been called stupid. The questions continue, and soon nearly everyone has crossed the line. They see that nearly everyone has been hurt by others. Then the tears start flowing and the bullies start apologizing and asking for forgiveness.

For Rich Dutra-St. John and Yvonne St. John-Dutra, the husband and wife team behind Challenge Day, the inspiration to form the program came from a shared painful school experience.

As Rich told it, Yvonne was “a short fat girl with braces” teased relentlessly in elementary school who found friends and popularity after becoming bulimic and joining the cheerleading squad only to be torn down as a “snob” when she eventually became homecoming queen. His own story is almost a mirror image: a popular elementary school student later tormented by his junior high classmates, who became popular again after bulking up and joining the wrestling team but who couldn’t find the strength to stop his popular teammates from tormenting other students.

The partial aim of the program is to make students strong enough to resist becoming active bullies or passive bullies like he was, Rich said. But the other component is making students comfortable enough with adults in their lives, like school bus drivers, that they can let someone know if they are bullied.

The NAPT program this fall won’t be quite the same as the full six-hour program that was featured on Oprah in 2006. Rather, pupil transportation professionals will participate in a shortened version of the course with just a handful of core exercises aimed at showing attendees the value of this kind of event.

For the company sponsoring the event, Transfinder, bringing this kind of programming to the conference is a chance to not only connect its software with potential solutions to bullying, but an opportunity to stop childhood torment like that which the company president suffered.

As a teenage immigrant, Transfinder president Tony Civitella faced constant degradation because he had not yet mastered English.

“When you don’t speak English, it’s beyond bullying. You get treated as if you’re not an intelligent person,” he said.

Civitella said he sees the next generations of Transfinder products as additions to the anti-bullying arsenal. He imagines this software compiling and analyzing incident reports and helping administrators recognize patterns of where and how bullying occurs. If students are less likely to bully and more likely to report bullying when they see it and administrators have the tools to understand incident reports, he believes the industry can start rooting out bullying.

“It’s a big goal for us, but we can do it. I know we can,” Civitella said.