Dr. Abhinav Saxena

TIFTON — The Tift County School System is partnering with Tift Regional Health System to put on a K-12 Parent Workshop on bullying, cyber-bullying, stress and depression beginning at 6 p.m. on Jan. 24.

Dr. Vickie King, who recently retired as a school counselor, will be giving the talk about bullying and stress. Johnathan Judy, chief technology and information officer for the school system, will be giving the talk about cyber-bullying. Dr. Abhinav Saxena, a psychiatrist at Tift Regional, will be giving the talk about depression.

“The Tift County school system believes that education is a shared responsibility of the student, the home, the educators and the community through commitment and participation,” Judy said. “We ask our parents, ‘What do you want to know more about? How can we help you at home with your students? What are the concerns you have? What are the things you think we see at school that you may not see at home?’”

He said that the goal of this and previous workshops is to help parents understand what their children are going through and how to help them.

“I think that we can overcome a lot of the problems we see each day if parents have a little bit more of an understanding about where (their kids) are coming from,” Judy said.

“These topics came about through a parent survey that we do at the end of every year,” said Laura Pope, a parent involvement coordinator at J.T. Reddick Elementary School and one of the organizers of the workshop. “So parents actually get to mark topics that are of great concern to them. Then we look at our percentages and base our parent workshop (topics) on those percentages.”

She said that these issues were something each of the schools in the Tift County school system needed to address, so they decided to hold an open workshop for all grade level parents, rather than letting each school do them individually.

Director of Federal Programs Michael Slaven said that these were the “hot button issues” that were highlighted by not only parents but principals and teachers from what they see first hand in the schools.

“This is just another way for us, not just as a school system but as a community, to try to educate parents,” he said.

Judy said that while bullying has always been present in school settings, the scope of bullying has changed due to increased use of social media and technology.

“Traditional bullying used to be very obvious,” Judy said. “Tone-drive… more physical, more face-to-face. Cyber-bullying has allowed for both non-typical bullies, people who you wouldn’t typically suspect to be bullies and aren’t bullies in real life or day-to-day, and misinterpretation of bullying situations.”

He said that kids today interact much differently today than they used to and that helping parents understand those interactions and how kids are communicating will lead to parents being able to understand their child’s world.

Pope said that parents will be able to take away valuable information to help tell good stress from bad stress and what the signs of bullying and depression are.

Slaven said that parents will also gain insight as to what it is like to deal with depression.

“If you’ve never battled depression you may not know the signs or the torment these kids go through,” he said. “Unfortunately in some cases those children end up doing very bad things to themselves when it could have been mitigated.”

The issue is of great concern to the school system since the number of safety plans implemented for children have increased.

Safety plans are plans put in place when a child has shown evidence of self-harm, regardless of the reason.

During the 2016-2017 school year 169 safety plans were implemented. That number jumped to 254 during the 2017-2018 school year, and Judy said that the 2018-2019 school year is trending towards that same number, with 123 safety plans being implemented as of Jan. 15.

Judy and Pope said that they were very pleased that Tift Regional wanted to partner with them to put on this workshop.

“It’s our belief that we can’t do this alone,” Judy said. “The whole community has to be involved.”

The workshop will be held at the Community Events Center located at 1657 Carpenter Rd, and childcare will be provided at Annie Belle Clark Elementary School, located at 1464 Carpenter Rd.