Volunteers mediate schoolyard conflicts
By: Beth Winegarner
Examiner Staff Writer
February 9, 2009
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| Americorps staff member Francis Sanchez plays basketball during recess at Hillcrest Elementary Wednesday. (Mike Koozmin/Special to The Examiner.) |
SAN FRANCISCO — Hillcrest Elementary School Principal Richard Zapien used to see five to seven students — facing discipline for playground squabbles — waiting outside his office after lunch every day. A year later, his office is empty.
Last spring, Hillcrest lost five of its teachers’ aides — whose jobs, in part, were to keep a close eye on students at recess and lunchtime — to budget cuts. That made it more difficult to keep student conflicts at bay. Then, the Excelsior district school landed a $450,000 state grant to hire AmeriCorps volunteers and boost staff hours, all to teach kids new ways of settling differences.
“Rather than an adult dealing with it, we tell them to go back and tell another student, ‘I don’t like what you said to me,’” Zapien said. “Often, the other child will say, ‘I’m sorry.’ It makes them reflect on what they’ve done.”
Hillcrest Elementary, located between the Mission Terrace neighborhood and Excelsior, is home to about 500 students who are predominantly from Bayview-Hunters Point and Visitacion Valley — two of the highest-crime, lowest-income neighborhoods in The City — according to school social worker Stefanie Eldred.
After a litany of parent concerns about schoolyard conflicts and chaos, school leaders met with those parents to brainstorm a solution. But, it had to be one they could pull off with limited money from the San Francisco Unified School District, Eldred said.
A grant from the California Department of Education will pay for six years of AmeriCorps volunteers, additional hours for after-school staff to patrol the yard from lunchtime into the afternoon, and mental-health consultants who will train school staff to work with students with physical, mental and emotional disabilities.
“There’s more one-on-one time between kids and adults now,” said Delta Yee, whose daughter is in fourth-grade at Hillcrest. “Now if they need help, they will go to a certain adult they trust.”
In addition to teaching students to work out their troubles, volunteers and staffers also sit with kids in the cafeteria and guide lunchtime conversation, or organize soccer, Hula-hoop and other activities on the playground to keep students from becoming rowdy, according to Zapien.
The bump in staff has also made it easier to bring parent volunteers like Yee into the school — no easy task among Hillcrest’s working-class families, said Nick Chandler, who coordinates after-school programs.
Hillcrest isn’t the only school experiencing break-time chaos, according to Eldred. “We feel like this program is a model that could be used in a lot of other schools,” she said.
Mediating conflicts
Hillcrest Elementary School has seen a significant drop in conflicts among students since AmeriCorps volunteers were brought in.
477 K-5 students at Hillcrest Elementary
77 Percent of students receiving free and reduced-cost lunches
$450,000 State grant for conflict-resolution and after-school programs
Sources: Hillcrest Elementary, state Department of Education
