For your convenience, we have installed the link below to make donations to this website easier. Now you can utilize your PayPal account or your credit card.

--------------

Rachel's Challenge is a worthy one

By Charlie Haeffner

Odessa, Nov. 6, 2007 -- Back a few years ago, I pulled my youngest son out of the Odessa-Montour school district because there was a serious bullying problem going on that was affecting him -- not just physically, but emotionally.

The district couldn't seem to get a handle on it, so I home-schooled him for that year -- his eighth-grade year -- and then let him decide where he wanted to be mainstreamed starting in ninth grade. He chose Corning East, which proved to be a wonderful school. My son did well there, and has become a happy, productive adult.

I bring this up not to throw brickbats at O-M, but because it came rushing back on me Monday morning, Nov. 5th, when I attended an amazing assembly at Watkins Glen High School featuring Rachel's Challenge -- a tutorial, if you will, that espouses kindness in the name of an amazing young woman who was killed in the Columbine massacre.

Bullying is one of the chief targets of Rachel's Challenge, which makes sense. When a message seeks peace and love, bullies are an obstacle to those things. And so that aspect of Rachel's Challenge brought back the frustration and anger created those years ago -- and even, I might add, took me back years beyond that to my own experience with a bully. But my son's experience was a fresher scar on the family psyche, and so that is the one that resonates.

But let's dispense with bullies as the topic, and look at the amazing message that Rachel's Challenge brings to our schools. (O-M had the program last year in assembly form. Watkins is taking it further by trying to incorporate the program goals into school goals. And it doubled up -- trying to impact on the community in general -- with an evening gathering in the school cafeteria that drew 150 people.)

The Rachel in question was Rachel Joy Scott, a 17-year-old who had never been outside of Colorado in her lifetime, but whose impact has spread worldwide through the efforts of her family and people like Monday's speaker at WGHS, David Gamache -- a Binghamton-area resident who joined the Challenge team last summer after speaking at high schools for other programs that taught tips on goal setting, interviewing, college searches and life skills.

Gamache says he had tired of those seminars -- and had told his wife that he needed something that spoke from the heart and not the head. The next day, while he was home, his wife called him into the TV room. "You better see this, honey," she said. He went in, sat down, and watched as Oprah Winfrey -- interviewing a relative of Rachel Scott's -- asked why the Rachel's Challenge movement was so affecting, so engaging.

"Because," said the interviewee, "we speak from the heart instead of the head."

It took Gamache no time at all before he had signed on with the Challenge team -- and since then he has addressed assemblies at 60 high schools throughout New York state. Other Challenge speakers address schools elsewhere in the country -- mostly in Colorado. At last count, he said, there were 23 members on the team.

He finds that in response to the assemblies -- gatherings which unveil Rachel's life, her remarkable insights kept in diaries, her kindness, and testimonials from those who knew her -- a great many students approach him afterward to thank him, tears in their eyes. While we were talking, three such students came up to him, and two gave him hugs.

"And there's the drive-by's, too," he noted, and then added: "Not the shooting kind. I'm talking about the men -- and boys, too -- who will file by after one of these programs, and they won't look me in the eye because they don't want to get emotional, and they'll kind of lean in as they're passing, and say, 'That's the most amazing program I ever saw.' That kind of drive-by."

What Gamache offered Monday -- what he and his team offer all over the country -- is a message of hope and kindness and love. It's a kind of ministry, although he's quick to say they don't use that word. That would get all tangled up in the religion-in-the-schools debate. Besides, this isn't really religion, although it is a gospel of sorts: the gospel according to Rachel.

If you've attended this program, you've found an amazing young woman wrapped within the words and images presented there: a girl who went out of her way to be kind, and yet who seemed to know, by her pronouncements, that she would die young. She said so on occasion, but not with any great portent; just as a matter of fact. And she said, too, that she would impact thousands of people around the world.

Well, she has, and she added me to her list on Monday. It's hard not to well up at the stories presented at this program -- stories of how she befriended people who were in desperate need of a friend, how she had little tolerance for bullies, and how she left behind, in six diaries, her thoughts and axioms to live by. It was in the last one that she drew a girl's eyes, with tears running down them, watering a plant that was blooming below. There were 13 tears in the photo -- the number of people who were murdered in the Columbine shootings. That picture was drawn on the last day of her life, before the bullets started flying.

There was a gentleman a thousand miles away who dreamed of those eyes, and those tears, and that plant shortly after the shootings made national news, and he thought it had something to do with young Rachel. He called Rachel's father to ask him if those images meant anything to him, but they didn't; the father hadn't discovered the drawing yet. Then, seven weeks after the shooting, the police released Rachel's belongings back to her family -- items contained in a knapsack after they were no longer needed as evidence. And inside the knapsack, her father found her last diary, and in the diary that last piece of artwork.

That diary and Rachel's five others -- along with an essay she wrote and which was discovered in her room following her death -- have served as the basis for the Challenge that is now reaching so many young people. It is a challenge to start what the Rachel's Challenge website calls a "chain reaction of kindness and compassion."

As Gamache outlined Monday, speaking to Watkins Glen middle-schoolers (after an assembly attended by high school students), the Challenge is to:

1. Eliminate prejudice. Look for the best in others.

2. Dare to dream. Set goals and keep a journal.

3. Choose positive influences. Input determines output.

4. Use kind words, and employ little acts of kindness.

Actions such as those, Rachel suggested in her writings, might just start a chain reaction of kindness and compassion that can impact school and home and community. (Depending on the audience, the Challenge might change slightly, but the goal -- kindness and compassion -- is always the same.)

"It's amazing," Gamache said. "But this message quite often can affect people's attitudes, alter them -- for a day or a week and sometimes much longer."

Rachel Scott, he said, was a person who "never did anything on a grand scale. But she did a lot of little things right." And through the circumstance of her death, and the insight of her writings, and the desire of her family to spread those insights -- and the stories of her many kindnesses -- the movement has blossomed.

After the assembly, students had the opportunity to sign up for the cause -- to affix their signatures to a banner with the heading: "I Accept Rachel's Challenge." They were lined up there in the school auditorium waiting for the chance to do so.

"After the assemblies," Gamache says, "the students are so moved that they feel like they have to do something. And this gives them something. And it points them in the right direction."

WGHS principal Dave Warren wants to keep them heading that way. Toward that end, students met in groups after the assembly to discuss their feelings about Rachel's Challenge, and groups were selected for training later in the day -- training designed to help devise strategies for keeping alive those thoughts and feelings generated by Rachel Scott.

"This is not the end of Rachel's Challenge," Warren told the evening gathering in the cafeteria. "This is the beginning."

The principal, a man devoted to eliminating bullying in his school, said "75 kids trained today to keep this going. We want it to build" -- to embrace the concepts of kindness and compassion that Rachel Scott embraced.

A physical manifestation of that are hundreds of paper cutouts in the shape of hands. Each student who attended the assemblies was asked to write his or her impression of the Challenge on one of those paper hands, which will be affixed to hallway walls. (This was reflective of a similar cutout Rachel once created, upon which she wrote some thoughts and beliefs.) Among the written WGHS comments so far, said Warren, were:

-- "Eye opening, stunning. It makes me want to be a better person."

-- "Hopeful."

-- "I feel so inspired."

-- "I am now going to do better in school and be nicer."

-- "It had a huge impact on me. Thank you for the experience."

-- "I should think about spending more time with my family."

Said Warren: "It had an impact on 450 kids today. Now I hope it makes an impact on the community."

To which this editor -- ruminating on the disruptive effect that bullies can have, and on Rachel's powerful message, and on the possiblity that it might just help reform some of those bullies (if they're listening) -- adds a heartfelt "Amen."

Photos in text:

Top: David Gamache and a screen carrying an image of Rachel Scott.

Second through Fourth: Gamache at Middle School students' assembly, a quote from Rachel's writings, and Gamache with one of the precepts of Rachel's Challenge.

Fifth and Sixth: Rachel's final drawing, and another image of Rachel from the assembly screen.

Seventh: Students sign up to accept Rachel's Challenge.