Schools
Family University Brings Port Chester Students, Parents Together
Program tackles serious issues, but also offers some fun.
Parents and students took part in various workshops at Port Chester Middle School Tuesday night as part of the second annual Family University.
The event, organized by the Port Chester Cares Community Coalition, was open to students in grades 5-12 and their parents. Some of the workshops for parents only, some for students only and others were mixed.
“It’s all about brining the community together and helping each other,” said Karen Fink, of Family Services of Westchester, another organizer of the event. “We want to give people the opportunity to learn different skill sets.”
The night was broken up into two 65-minute sessions split up with a 35-minute family meal in the cafeteria.
“Last year we got about 400 people,” Fink said. “The ability to bring everyone together to learn about some very important issues was a no-brainer.”
She added that she wasn’t sure how many people were there Tuesday night, but many of the classrooms housing the workshops were full. The workshops ranged from things like drug and alcohol awareness to bully-proofing you children to protecting your family on the internet to managing money to transitioning to college. There were also some more active workshops, such as soccer, dancing, yoga and zumba. There was also a childcare area with music and arts and crafts for kids too young for the workshops.
The event was run by organizers, but there were also many faculty and student volunteers as well. The workshops were run by a wide range of specialists. A workshop on bullying was run by Dr. Joel Haber, author of “Bullyproof Your Child For Life.”
He started his workshop asking what the parents thought bullying was, and he combined a few answers to say it’s typically a kind of intimidation and harassment.
“Bullying is about one person or a group trying to make one person feel little,” he said.
Haber added bullying about an “imbalance of power,” and can take all of the fun out of school for the children being bullied. He also talked a few different styles of bullying, including not only physically or verbally, but exclusion. Haber said one place exclusion can take place is at the lunch table, where kids might tell on child he or she can’t sit at their lunch table. One way to end that type of bullying is for someone else invite that person to sit somewhere else, but Haber said studies have shown that happens about one out of 100 times.
Flor Vasquez, who has two sons at Port Chester Middle School, attended the bullying workshop.
“I want to know how to protect them so they don’t get bullied,” she said. “I want to know how to prevent this epidemic.”
A group of students from Purchase College held a workshop on transitioning from high school to college. They were members of Project Focus, a program that reaches out to students in middle and high schools from “traditionally under-represented backgrounds and assist in their development of leadership skills and goals clarification with the long term hope of including higher education aspirations,” according to its website.
The group put their desks in a circle with the students at the workshop and answered questions about a variety of topics. The college students also talked about some difficulties they ran into when applying to schools, whether it be financial or simply where to send the applications.
