Since November, Thompson Middle School students in St. Charles have been working on HOPE.
HOPE is Helping Others Protect Each Other, a new effort to give students a strong core peer group with the same priorities, said 6th-grade teacher and leader Julie Bergeson. “It is to help students practice making healthy choices, to extend learning to the real world.”
Their final activity for the school year was a reward for students who had regularly participated in HOPE meetings but also a fun way to work on communication and help skills. Fourteen HOPE members climbed the ropes in HOPE’s Getting High Without the Risk program at Wheaton Park District’s Teams and Ropes Course at Lincoln Marsh.
Climbing up to 25 feet in the air, they reinforce such issues as how to trust, how to communicate knowledge, what risks are safe and what aren’t, and how to help one another, said Bryan Mullen, the course facility coordinator.
Bergeson started HOPE at Thompson this year to create a stepping stone for students going into St. Charles High School’s HOPE program. A planning team of 15 students organized events and meetings for the 6th to 8th graders. A DARE officer talked at one meeting. In a popular activity called Gender Gap, students got to ask questions of the opposite sex anonymously and appropriately. “They wanted to do that every week,” Bergeson said.
Although largely a 6th-grade group this year, Bergeson anticipates the group growing to include more 7th and 8th graders next school year.
