NEA HIN believes that creating safe and healthy public schools and communities is essential to keeping kids in and focused on their education.
Internet Safety
HIN’s internet safety focus is based on providing the information and tools to students, educators, guardians, and parents that will keep their internet experiences an exciting, enriching, and most important: safe. Our efforts are not contained to stationary computers. The student of today has unprecedented access to the internet via laptops and handheld wireless devices. Our students can connect at school, at home, and just about everywhere else they go. NEA HIN supports freedom to explore and interact online but recognizes the increase of the potential risks associated with the internet.
To this end, NEA HIN in partnership with the Sprint Corporation and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, to establish the 4netsafety project. The mission of the 4netsafety project is to help young teens better understand those risks and to educate parents, guardians, teachers and other adults about the power of the internet.
This partnership has led to resources like bnets@vvy, our internet safety newsletter. Adults also have free access to the bnets@vvy e-newsletter (bnetsavvy.org), an online newsletter published by the NEA HIN that offers adults a vast array of information to help teach pre-teens how to navigate the internet safely. The publication includes stories from teens, parents, educators, and internet safety experts.
School Crisis
Today’s public schools face an unprecedented amount of threats to a safe and healthy learning environment. Despite the fact that a crisis, community, school, faculty, students, and staff may come in all different shapes and sizes, there is a common thread in overcoming them: any crisis can be prepared for, reacted to, and responded to.
To handle a crisis situation effectively, information – and to be more specific properly communicating that information – is vital to resolving the challenges that a crisis can present.
The NEA Health Information Network, through a generous grant from the Sprint Foundation, created The School Crisis Guide in order to foster the creation of crisis teams with the ideas, tips, tools, and, resources that spur effective leadership and crisis management.
Bullying
Almost 30% of youth in the United States (or over 5.7 million) are estimated to be involved in bullying as either a bully, a target of bullying, or both. In a recent national survey of students in grades 6-10, 13% reported bullying others, 11% reported being the target of bullies, and another 6% said that they bullied others and were bullied themselves.
Bullying is aggressive behavior that is intentional and that involves an imbalance of power or strength. Bullying takes a variety of forms including name calling, physical violence, teasing and harassment, exclusion from group, and cyber bullying, which uses the internet, social networking sites, IM, and texting. The effects of bullying on young people can be serious. Children who are bullied are more likely than their peers to be depressed, lonely and anxious; have low self esteem; and, have low academic performance in school. The effect of the act of the bully is also striking. A 1993 study by Olweus, found that boys who identified as bullies in middle school were four times as likely as their non-bullying peers to have more than one criminal conviction by age 24.
Addressing bullying issues in schools must be done in a comprehensive approach. It must focus on creating a school-wide climate that discourages bullying, training to prepare staff to deal with bullying, development of consistent rules addressing bullying, working directly with both bullies and those who have been bullied, and family and community involvement.
Parent-Child Communications
While parents play a vital role in the health and sexuality education of their children they often struggle with how to fulfill this role. Across the nation, surveys and polls show that Americans are concerned about aids and want help with how to talk with their children about HIV/Aids and related issues like sexuality, health and relationships. One survey, conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation in march 1996, indicated that 53% of respondents were very concerned about their child getting aids and identified “what to discuss with their children” as their number one need for aids information.
Numerous studies have demonstrated the importance of an open and communicative relationship between parents and their children. Adolescents who feel they have high-quality relationships with their parents and who communicate regularly with their parents are more likely to initiate sex at a later age and exhibit fewer sexual risk-taking behaviors. Parents who discuss issues of sexuality and contraceptive use and who communicate strong disapproval of sexual activity are more likely to have children with more positive reproductive health outcomes. Adolescent children whose parents are involved in their schooling exhibit fewer risk-taking behaviors. (Miller, 1998), (Manlove, 1998), (Miller, Levin, Whitaker, & Xu, Romer et al. 1999) based on the these findingsNEA HIN developed the can we talk program designed to give parents the skill and resources for having on-going conversations with their kids on topics such as HIV/Aids, teen pregnancy, bullying and violence and drug and alcohol use.