10/4/2009
By TIM UNRUH Salina Journal
While a freshman at Norton High School, Pat Haxton said a few of his classmates were made to push a penny around the lid of a toilet stool with their noses.

"I personally never had it happen. I also had a brother who was a senior," Haxton said.

Jeff Geist said he was "maybe kind of mouthy" as a freshman at Montezuma High School, and was the victim of a longtime prank pulled in football locker rooms -- having Cramergesic smeared in his shoes, football helmet and jock strap. The muscle relaxant gel can really burn if it touches the wrong parts of the body, he said.

"I'm not saying it was something that was right, but it was something to welcome in the freshmen," Geist said. "I've seen that end of it."

Hazing, referred by some as initiation, was more common in the early 1980s, said Haxton, the head football coach at Southeast of Saline High School, near Gypsum, and Geist, the head coach at Abilene High School. Both are 43.

Mike Weatherman, 60, head football coach at Sylvan Unified school district, Sylvan Grove, remembers some hazing when he played football from 1963 to 1967 at Elkhart High School.

"The Cramer thing was what I always remember. They put it in your jock or underwear. Taping kids to the benches, that's happened," Weatherman said. "There used to be fist fighting when I was growing up. You don't see that anymore."

All three coaches are aware of what occurred Aug. 21 in a Beloit High School locker room, when a senior football player applied the muscle relaxant to the body of a freshman teammate, injuring him.

The resulting police investigation led to one player, a senior, being charged with four misdemeanors. He pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing.

Happens less frequently

But the coaches agree that reports of extreme hazings are less frequent these days.

"With time it's kind of decreased. You don't see it as much," Weatherman said. "The kids have had lyceums (lectures) on bullying. We tell them that's not accepted here. If we catch kids doing it, we take care of it, and we stay in the locker room."

Hazing and bullying have become less chronic in schools, said Vickie Price, education director of Child Advocacy and Parenting Services, 153 S. Fifth, partly because efforts to educate students, faculty, staff and parents have increased.

Most every school district has a policy against bullying, she said.

"When we were in school (in the 1950s and '60s), I don't believe there were those kinds of policies, and people dealt with things as they came up," Price said.

In her presentations to 150 classrooms a year -- third through sixth grades in Salina and surrounding communities -- Price covers bullying.

"We've talked more about it over the past 30 years, and we know that bullying doesn't have to be a rite of passage," Price said.

But bullying still occurs.

"We know that on an average, 160,000 kids in our country stay home from school every day because of bullying," she said.

Besides the obvious, that bullying is never good for the victims -- and bullies need help, too -- having that many children missing school is a concern.

Schools are trying hard to improve test scores, Price said, and one way to "make sure schools are a safe place to learn is to cut down on bullying."

Attention from Columbine

Bullying was moved to the forefront of consciousness by tragic events such as the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School, in Littleton, Colo.

Two students shot and killed 13 people and wounded 24 others before killing themselves.

"That woke everybody up," Price said. "What we found out since then, is most bullies have been victims somewhere in their lives.

"I'm absolutely not excusing anything, but we later learned that those two boys at Columbine had been victims," Price said. "Those victims became what they hate."

Some forms of initiation, such as the tradition of freshmen putting away football equipment after practice, continue today, the coaches said, but the more extreme activities have subsided.

Like most any school there is a degree of bullying, such as older students cutting in front of the lunch line, Haxton said, but hazing is not a big issue at Southeast of Saline.

"I don't hear about it. That doesn't mean that it doesn't happen," he said. "If you're a football player, other football players have your back and nothing like that should happen, at least nothing recently."

Comes in many forms

Bullying comes in many forms, said Chad Flesher, a Saline County Sheriff's deputy, and the Ell-Saline schools resource officer.

"It's kids trying to be mean, physically hurting others. It's not always physical, especially with girls," he said. "It's a lot more name calling, excluding them from a group, isolating them."

Flesher said he was a victim while a student in the Concordia School District.

"Fifth and sixth grades were my two worst years. I would miss the bus on purpose so I wouldn't have to go," he recalled. "There was a lot of name calling, and I got punched a couple times."

In some cases, Flesher said, "bullying crosses that line and it becomes a criminal matter."

To combat violence the Brookville-based Ell-Saline school district formed a bullying prevention committee in 2008. Flesher is a member.

The district uses the Olweus Program, which allows students to "police themselves," said Adam McDaniel, the middle school and high school principal.

"There's a lot of staff buy-in to it, and a lot of it is student driven," he said. "The two bullying incidents we've had this year have been student reported."

The program is built into the school day, with required bullying classes of 15 to 18 students each.

"The students are feeling comfortable opening up, talking about situations, approaching staff," McDaniel said. "One of the best pieces of this is the students having the ability to work with each other and trying make sure we're all giving ourselves the respect and dignity that we deserve."

Students aren't as apprehensive about reporting bullying, Flesher said, which is paramount.

"If we don't know about it, we can't fix it," he said.

Things have changed

Abilene's Geist said a lot has changed since he was in high school, such as the drinking age being moved from 18 to 21.

"Coaches, players and parents are more aware of things going on and things that are happening," he said.

Policies and procedures have changed at Beloit High School, Principal Daryl Moore said, to curb hazing.

"One of the things is the mechanics of our supervision for sports, as well as in the locker rooms during (physical education)," he said.

By "mechanics," Moore means "where people are standing, which people are responsible for covering which areas, and those types of things."

In one locker room a window is being added to a coach's office to improve visibility, he said.

The Beloit School District also invited in a statewide presenter who talked with high school and junior high students, and the student council.

When his senior football season began in 1983, Geist said, he and fellow veteran players didn't involve themselves in those kinds of pranks.

"That was something we didn't get into doing," he said. "Some kids do that, and there are some who do become sensitive to others and say they are a part of our team, part of us."

Hazing, specifically, is not brought up at Abilene Cowboy team meetings, Geist said.

"We talk about making good decisions, knowing where the line's at."

Southeast of Saline teachers have had training on bullying, and cyber-bullying, Haxton said.

Different environment

The Southeast of Saline school environment is different than larger schools, such as Junction City High School, where he worked for seven years -- 1992 to 1999 -- as a teacher and coach, Haxton said.

"In Junction City, there wasn't so much bullying, but there were fights," Haxton said. "We're in a different spot at Southeast. We're kind of sheltered ... in a nice community, but I don't know that I've noticed bullying at either place. It can be an issue, no matter what the size of school. Kids are kids."

n Reporter Tim Unruh can be reached at 822-1419 or by e-mail at tunruh@salina.com.