Contact the counselors at 770 975-6615
Wednesday, August 10, 2016
Friday, August 5, 2016
7 Tips to Protect Your Children from Cyberbullying
We're here to help protect you and your family in everyday life — including when you're online and on your phones. With kids these days constantly on social media and using technology in unprecedented ways, it opens the door even wider for harassment. To help prevent a cyberbullying incident (when kids bully each other through electronic technology) and any related legal issues, here is some helpful information and seven tips about online safety and preventing cyberbullying.
The Different Forms — and Dangers of — Cyberbullying
Cyberbullying can take many forms, including sending mean messages or threats, spreading rumors, posting unflattering pictures or pretending to be someone else online. There are many factors at play that make cyberbullying more difficult for young people to deal with than face-to-face bullying. While cyberbullying usually starts as a face-to-face encounter with someone the victim knows, texts and social media can quickly escalate the situation to widespread harassment and public humiliation.
In a survey conducted by the Cyberbullying Research Center, 34 percent of kids reported being a victim of cyberbullying at some time in their lives. Additionally, according to Cyberbullying.gov:
- Kids who are being cyberbullied are often bullied in person as well.
- Kids who are cyberbullied have a harder time getting away from the behavior.
- Cyberbullying can happen any time of the day or night, and reach a kid even when he or she is alone.
- Cyberbullying messages and images can be posted anonymously and distributed quickly to a very wide audience. It can be difficult and sometimes impossible to trace the source.
- Deleting inappropriate or harassing messages, texts and pictures is extremely difficult after they have been posted or sent.
How Cyberbullying Can Impact Your Kids — and You
Young people need to understand the consequences of every message, picture or post they put online. Even something intended as a joke could reflect badly on them later when they apply for college or a job. And if remarks are intended to hurt or harass someone, the sender could lose a cell phone or online account. As laws in every state become stricter, cyberbullies — and their parents — are more frequently facing legal charges for harassment.
To better protect your children, talk to them and find out more about their school and online experiences with cyberbullying. Consider these tips to as a way to start the conversation and stay safer online.
- When your child gets a new phone or social media account, it's a good time to explain the consequences of what's posted. Set — and keep — boundaries that include the loss of their phone or computer privileges if damaging pictures or messages are posted or forwarded.
- Make sure teens know that what goes online, stays online. Any electronic message is, or can be, made public very easily. If you don't want everyone to know, don't send it online. Better yet, follow the old adage, if you'd be embarrassed if it was published on the front page of the newspaper, then don't write it.
- Encourage your children to tell an adult if they see cyberbullying happening to either themselves or others. Let them know they will not be punished if they are the victim and reassure them that being bullied is not their fault.
- If your child is harassed, keep all cyberbullying messages as proof. Depending on the severity of the message, parents may want to involve the school or the police. While going directly to the bully's parents might provide relief, it is not always practical or possible. In this case, letting the school, the cell phone carrier or internet service provider intervene may be an effective first step.
- If necessary, block the person who is sending harassing messages. You may also need to get a new phone number or email address and be cautious about who receives the new contact information.
- Make sure teens never share passwords with anyone except a parent. Don't write it down or place it where others could find it. This also helps curb incidents of identity theft.
- Parents may want to keep the computer in a shared space such as a family room and limit internet access in a teen's room. It's also important to have times when everyone simply turns off all the technology. It's tough when everyone is busy, but set boundaries at meal time or a certain point in the evening when everyone turns off cell phones, tablets and computers.
Tuesday, August 2, 2016
Student Support Services
The counselor's office exists
to help students overcome the obstacles and barriers
that keep them from being successful in the classroom,
and ultimately in life.
As adults all of us have clutter and distractions that are a normal part of life, yet we still have jobs and responsibilities to manage. As counselors, we work with students to teach them the life skills that enable them to work through those issues without being tripped up. Among others, topics covered during classroom guidance will include:
- Peer relationships
- School to work transitions
- Mapping an educational plan
- Career exploration
- Truancy/attendance
- Personal management/disciplines
- Decisions that derail goals
- Sexual harassment
- Bullying
- Conflict management
Wednesday, July 27, 2016
Contacting Your Counselors
Mrs. Cindy Zell
Counselor for
6th Grade & 7th Grade letters M-Z
770 975-6615 x230
cynthia.zell@cobbk12.org
Dr. Chris Deane
Counselor for
7th Grade letters A-L & 8th Grade
770 975-6615 x231
christopher.deane@cobbk12.org
Monday, July 25, 2016
Registration Appointments
Please contact the front office staff to make appointments for registering new students. Please do not dial the counselor phone lines because the custodial staff is still working on cleaning carpets and waxing floors in the offices so we do not have access to those phones until Wednesday or Thursday.
A list of required documents and forms is available on the Awtrey webpage. Having items completed in advance will greatly speed up the process once you arrive.
A list of required documents and forms is available on the Awtrey webpage. Having items completed in advance will greatly speed up the process once you arrive.
Friday, June 17, 2016
Social Media Rants Persist Despite Workplace Costs - By Ernie Suggs
* Great information about social media we need to help our students realize sooner rather than later. By ERNIE SUGGS ESUGGS@AJC.COM. Originally published in the June 6, 2016 edition of the AJC
Anything you post ‘has the potential to go viral,’ expert says.
Following a social media firestorm that claimed the job of Christine McMullen Lindgren, a banker who posted racist comments on Facebook, media experts are being asked the question that might never be answered: Why does this keep happening?
“Social media didn’t cause that woman to lose her job. Her ignorance did,” said Tracie Powell, founder and editor of All Digitocracy, an online platform focused on media diversity and audience development.
“There is no expectation of privacy when it comes to the internet. None,” Powell said. “How many times must we see people lose their jobs before it finally sinks in?”
On Wednesday, Lindgren, who at the time identified herself as a Bank of America personal banker, launched an attack on Facebook in which she used the n-word twice, suggested that slavery was deserved, that welfare was common among blacks, and that blacks should pack up and go back to Africa.
Social media — most notably Facebook and Twitter — quickly pounced on her and the bank. Less than 24 hours after the Atlanta-based employee posted the rant, Bank of America fired her.
Sherri Williams, a media scholar who teaches at Wake Forest University, said these types of incidents continue to happen because people feel comfortable expressing themselves freely on social networks without realizing their comments may be perceived as offensive to a national audience.
“People are used to saying what they want on social media and thinking that their friends and followers are their only audience. They don’t realize that anything they post has the potential to go viral,” Williams said.
“But there are consequences for the racist, sexist and insensitive things people post. These kinds of posts have ended people’s careers because companies don’t want to be associated with employees who express ideas that are prejudicial. That’s bad for business,” Williams said.
Lindgren is just the latest in a long line of people who have lost their reputations or jobs, or both, over something they posted on social media.
There were the bankers in England, who were fired over re-enacting, and posting on Instagram, a mock ISIS beheading.
Or the Houston hospital worker, who in the wake of the Ferguson uprising, said police need to start mowing down black people to “purge them.”
Or Justine Sacco, who before boarding a plane in 2013 from New York to Cape Town tweeted, “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” Before her 11-hour flight landed, while she was totally oblivious, Sacco had become an international pariah and had been fired from her corporate communications job.
A Georgia education official who posted online about race, religion and partisan politics was fired in January.
A n d l a s t O c t o b e r i n Atlanta, Gerod Roth was fired from Polaris Marketing Group after an errant Facebook post. Roth, who is white, posted a selfie of himself and a black co-worker’s toddler son. It seemed innocent, until comments about the photo descended toward madness. Roth said the child “was abandoned in the Atlanta projects, to fend for himself, he is deaf mute, (can’t) properly communicate and is in and out of a shelter home ...”
Richard Eldredge, digital editor at VOX Teen Communications and founder and editor of the digital magazine “Eldredge ATL,” said while bad decision-making is hardly new, personal technology has made it easier to earn a “scarlet letter.”
“If we get incensed about something, responding to it is as easy as launching an app on our phones,” Eldredge said. “I’ve seen well-respected adult professionals in this city ... post idiotic things that damage their brand and credibility.”
Williams, at Wake Forest, said while social media democratizes communication and allows everyday people and marginalized groups to amplify their voices — think #blacklivesmatter or the #beyhive — it has also become a space where bigotry can be amplified.
“Everyday individuals’ bigoted feelings are exposed through social media and we see them face consequences,” she said.
Powell, the Digitocracy editor who is also a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University, trains and advises media professionals and brands on how to avoid online pitfalls.
In other words, prevent them from becoming Lindgrens.
“People don’t think about all the myriad ways information gets out,” Powell said. “Once it’s out, it’s out.”
And quick.
While Lindgren most likely was posting to engage with her Facebook friends, someone took a screen shot of her rant before she could delete it. Within hours, it was global.
“It took only five minutes for both an African-American Facebook friend to post, ‘She’s blown a gasket here, folks,’ and another to discern where she worked, presumably because the information was posted on her profile,” Eldredge said. “The lack of punctuation and the run-on sentence in the original post could indicate that it was tapped out quickly without a lot of thought via a mobile phone app. We’ve made it scary easy to post without thinking.”
Millions saw it, thousands forwarded it, and hundreds commented on all of those forwards. People even began flooding Bank of America’s social media accounts and phone lines, demanding answers (and Lindgren’s head).
“Think before you post,” Powell said. “Ask yourself, is this really something I want to put out there? Is this really reflective of me as a person, and how I want people to view me? Ask, how might others perceive this? How might this impact my job prospects?”
At Vox, Eldredge has developed a series of workshops to train teens in social media etiquette with an eye on college. One exercise encourages students to play the role of a college admissions officer and critique the social media page of a classmate, looking for questionable content.
“We’ve never held a digital imprint workshop at VOX when teens haven’t gone in and deleted certain photos or posts after a peer points out something inappropriate,” he said.
The workshops have been expanded to schools and after-school programs.
“It’s really a lesson for every single one of us,” Eldredge said. “Nobody is immune from letting their emotions temporarily take over and putting something out there that can be captured for all eternity via a screen grab. The trick is not posting it in the first place.”
Anything you post ‘has the potential to go viral,’ expert says.
Following a social media firestorm that claimed the job of Christine McMullen Lindgren, a banker who posted racist comments on Facebook, media experts are being asked the question that might never be answered: Why does this keep happening?
“Social media didn’t cause that woman to lose her job. Her ignorance did,” said Tracie Powell, founder and editor of All Digitocracy, an online platform focused on media diversity and audience development.
“There is no expectation of privacy when it comes to the internet. None,” Powell said. “How many times must we see people lose their jobs before it finally sinks in?”
On Wednesday, Lindgren, who at the time identified herself as a Bank of America personal banker, launched an attack on Facebook in which she used the n-word twice, suggested that slavery was deserved, that welfare was common among blacks, and that blacks should pack up and go back to Africa.
Social media — most notably Facebook and Twitter — quickly pounced on her and the bank. Less than 24 hours after the Atlanta-based employee posted the rant, Bank of America fired her.
Sherri Williams, a media scholar who teaches at Wake Forest University, said these types of incidents continue to happen because people feel comfortable expressing themselves freely on social networks without realizing their comments may be perceived as offensive to a national audience.
“People are used to saying what they want on social media and thinking that their friends and followers are their only audience. They don’t realize that anything they post has the potential to go viral,” Williams said.
“But there are consequences for the racist, sexist and insensitive things people post. These kinds of posts have ended people’s careers because companies don’t want to be associated with employees who express ideas that are prejudicial. That’s bad for business,” Williams said.
Lindgren is just the latest in a long line of people who have lost their reputations or jobs, or both, over something they posted on social media.
There were the bankers in England, who were fired over re-enacting, and posting on Instagram, a mock ISIS beheading.
Or the Houston hospital worker, who in the wake of the Ferguson uprising, said police need to start mowing down black people to “purge them.”
Or Justine Sacco, who before boarding a plane in 2013 from New York to Cape Town tweeted, “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” Before her 11-hour flight landed, while she was totally oblivious, Sacco had become an international pariah and had been fired from her corporate communications job.
A Georgia education official who posted online about race, religion and partisan politics was fired in January.
A n d l a s t O c t o b e r i n Atlanta, Gerod Roth was fired from Polaris Marketing Group after an errant Facebook post. Roth, who is white, posted a selfie of himself and a black co-worker’s toddler son. It seemed innocent, until comments about the photo descended toward madness. Roth said the child “was abandoned in the Atlanta projects, to fend for himself, he is deaf mute, (can’t) properly communicate and is in and out of a shelter home ...”
Richard Eldredge, digital editor at VOX Teen Communications and founder and editor of the digital magazine “Eldredge ATL,” said while bad decision-making is hardly new, personal technology has made it easier to earn a “scarlet letter.”
“If we get incensed about something, responding to it is as easy as launching an app on our phones,” Eldredge said. “I’ve seen well-respected adult professionals in this city ... post idiotic things that damage their brand and credibility.”
Williams, at Wake Forest, said while social media democratizes communication and allows everyday people and marginalized groups to amplify their voices — think #blacklivesmatter or the #beyhive — it has also become a space where bigotry can be amplified.
“Everyday individuals’ bigoted feelings are exposed through social media and we see them face consequences,” she said.
Powell, the Digitocracy editor who is also a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University, trains and advises media professionals and brands on how to avoid online pitfalls.
In other words, prevent them from becoming Lindgrens.
“People don’t think about all the myriad ways information gets out,” Powell said. “Once it’s out, it’s out.”
And quick.
While Lindgren most likely was posting to engage with her Facebook friends, someone took a screen shot of her rant before she could delete it. Within hours, it was global.
“It took only five minutes for both an African-American Facebook friend to post, ‘She’s blown a gasket here, folks,’ and another to discern where she worked, presumably because the information was posted on her profile,” Eldredge said. “The lack of punctuation and the run-on sentence in the original post could indicate that it was tapped out quickly without a lot of thought via a mobile phone app. We’ve made it scary easy to post without thinking.”
Millions saw it, thousands forwarded it, and hundreds commented on all of those forwards. People even began flooding Bank of America’s social media accounts and phone lines, demanding answers (and Lindgren’s head).
“Think before you post,” Powell said. “Ask yourself, is this really something I want to put out there? Is this really reflective of me as a person, and how I want people to view me? Ask, how might others perceive this? How might this impact my job prospects?”
At Vox, Eldredge has developed a series of workshops to train teens in social media etiquette with an eye on college. One exercise encourages students to play the role of a college admissions officer and critique the social media page of a classmate, looking for questionable content.
“We’ve never held a digital imprint workshop at VOX when teens haven’t gone in and deleted certain photos or posts after a peer points out something inappropriate,” he said.
The workshops have been expanded to schools and after-school programs.
“It’s really a lesson for every single one of us,” Eldredge said. “Nobody is immune from letting their emotions temporarily take over and putting something out there that can be captured for all eternity via a screen grab. The trick is not posting it in the first place.”
Tuesday, June 14, 2016
Why Helicopter Parents Produce Boomerang Kids - by Tim Elmore
I spent the last few days studying thirty years of student trends and patterns. While both K-12 and Higher Education have gone through transitions—the greatest shift in three decades of childhood is the parents.
Parents are doing their job differently than they did forty years ago.
We’ve all heard the term, “Helicopter Parent.” It’s a title we’ve affectionately bestowed upon moms and dads who hover over their children, believing that their child needs their attention, their help, their insight or their power to make it in life. These parents are all too happy to leverage that power to pave the way for their child.
Social scientists have noted the results of helicopter parenting between 1985 and 2015:
What Has This Done to Kids as Emerging Adults? The following are summaries of how it has affected millions of Millennials:
May I remind you of something you’ll want to consider as a parent or an educator? Helicopter Parents tend to produce “Boomerang Kids.” This was a term popularized by author Carl Pickhardt who wrote a book by this title in 2011.
Boomerang kids are children who leave the “nest” for college or other coming of age rituals, and who end up coming back home to reassess what will be next for them. These kids initially leave their parents’ homes, but end up “boomeranging” back once they’ve accomplished what they were sent out to do.
Should it be any surprise to us that this happens? The children of helicopter parents have never planned for the future on their own. It’s only natural that instead of planning for the future as college is coming to an end, they return back to mom and dad—the ones who have been there for every decision in their life thus far. Kathleen Shaputis’s 2004 book The Crowded Nest Syndrome: Surviving the Return of Adult Children, coined some of the phenomena that we now, a decade later, think of as a normal part of parenting. Later in 2015, NBC aired its first episode of “Crowded.” The tagline? “The Nest Wasn’t Empty for Long.”
A Parental Evaluation:
So, let’s do a little assessment on how we’re doing as adults today:
Helicopter Parent: Do you hover too much, over-functioning and controlling?
Snowplow Parent: Do you clear the path for your kid, making things easier?
Stealth Bomber Parent: Do you go beyond these with active confrontation?
In my book, Generation iY, I include an entire chapter on eight damaging parenting styles that our generation of parents practices far too often. I encourage you to read it as I attempt to provide a plan to ease off the controls and allow your student to mature and become self-sufficient.
Yet, here is the larger question: Do we even want this?
Do we prepare the path for the child instead of the child for the path because we secretly want our kids to remain dependent upon us? Because…it feels good to be needed and wanted? In the same way that many mothers utilized a “Nanny-Cam” in the nursery when their baby slept, parents are now requesting “Campus-Cams” to keep watch over their kids in college, as adults. While I understand the desire for campus safety, my question is: when will we cease being their “personal assistants” and empower them to grow up and be adults? When is “easy” not the goal? When do we prepare them to face the music?
Do you really want a Boomerang for a child?
* Taken from Tim Elmore's Growling Leaders Blog. It provides tons of resources and excellent insights to help parents and educators develop students. Subscribing is highly recommended.
Parents are doing their job differently than they did forty years ago.
We’ve all heard the term, “Helicopter Parent.” It’s a title we’ve affectionately bestowed upon moms and dads who hover over their children, believing that their child needs their attention, their help, their insight or their power to make it in life. These parents are all too happy to leverage that power to pave the way for their child.
Social scientists have noted the results of helicopter parenting between 1985 and 2015:
- When students reach college they are more immature, coddled by parents.
- They are a generation that grew up without ever skinning their knees.
- Few have felt the pain of real failure—hence, never developed resilience.
- Many got “stickers and ribbons” for everything; everyone is above average.
- It is common for parents to do a daily a wake-up call for their child in college.
- These students want their college education to continue their “bubble life.”
What Has This Done to Kids as Emerging Adults? The following are summaries of how it has affected millions of Millennials:
- They have an inflated view of their accomplishments—60 percent even say their grades are not a “true reflection” of their work.
- They have trouble with faculty, who are honest with them. Professors have requested their college hire a “Dean of Parents” to handle all the calls.
- This trend led faculty to wrongfully commit “grade inflation” at a skyrocketing pace since 1970. In 1969, 7 percent made straight As. Today, it’s 41 percent.
- They expect prizes and praises for required behavior—like in kindergarten, when they got a “Super Sitter” sticker, just for sitting still in class.
- They feel entitled to passing marks—and even excellent marks—simply for attendance or for turning in average work. They are the “deserving” generation.
- 65% of college students admit to cheating. It isn’t because they’re immoral, but because they feel the pressure to get results for their parents.
- They are still attached with an emotional umbilical cord to mom. One in five students calls home three or more times a day while in college.
May I remind you of something you’ll want to consider as a parent or an educator? Helicopter Parents tend to produce “Boomerang Kids.” This was a term popularized by author Carl Pickhardt who wrote a book by this title in 2011.
Boomerang kids are children who leave the “nest” for college or other coming of age rituals, and who end up coming back home to reassess what will be next for them. These kids initially leave their parents’ homes, but end up “boomeranging” back once they’ve accomplished what they were sent out to do.
Should it be any surprise to us that this happens? The children of helicopter parents have never planned for the future on their own. It’s only natural that instead of planning for the future as college is coming to an end, they return back to mom and dad—the ones who have been there for every decision in their life thus far. Kathleen Shaputis’s 2004 book The Crowded Nest Syndrome: Surviving the Return of Adult Children, coined some of the phenomena that we now, a decade later, think of as a normal part of parenting. Later in 2015, NBC aired its first episode of “Crowded.” The tagline? “The Nest Wasn’t Empty for Long.”
A Parental Evaluation:
So, let’s do a little assessment on how we’re doing as adults today:
Helicopter Parent: Do you hover too much, over-functioning and controlling?
Snowplow Parent: Do you clear the path for your kid, making things easier?
Stealth Bomber Parent: Do you go beyond these with active confrontation?
In my book, Generation iY, I include an entire chapter on eight damaging parenting styles that our generation of parents practices far too often. I encourage you to read it as I attempt to provide a plan to ease off the controls and allow your student to mature and become self-sufficient.
Yet, here is the larger question: Do we even want this?
Do we prepare the path for the child instead of the child for the path because we secretly want our kids to remain dependent upon us? Because…it feels good to be needed and wanted? In the same way that many mothers utilized a “Nanny-Cam” in the nursery when their baby slept, parents are now requesting “Campus-Cams” to keep watch over their kids in college, as adults. While I understand the desire for campus safety, my question is: when will we cease being their “personal assistants” and empower them to grow up and be adults? When is “easy” not the goal? When do we prepare them to face the music?
Do you really want a Boomerang for a child?
* Taken from Tim Elmore's Growling Leaders Blog. It provides tons of resources and excellent insights to help parents and educators develop students. Subscribing is highly recommended.
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