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School-conflict program may grow District sets up community focus group to take its lesson plans beyond Medford By VICKI GUARINO For seven years, Medford school district staff experimented, wrote lesson plans, experimented some more, and rewrote lesson plans. They researched teaching techniques and consulted with social service specialists and police. Finally last spring, after 14 drafts, they published a full kindergarten-through-12th-grade curriculum for teaching peaceful conflict resolution and problem solving. Now the school district is returning to the community for assistance to expand the program beyond Medford's 18 schools. "If the community doesn't embrace this it's not going to get anywhere," says JoAnnemarie Bradshaw, a child-development specialist who is coordinating Medford's conflict-resolution effort. With support of the school district, Bradshaw has organized a community focus group to get the program into every classroom in the county. So far, the community group has drawn representatives from the family court, social service offices, the district attorney's office and the medical community. A couple of schools outside Medford already have asked Bradshaw for assistance in launching the program. Central Point's new alternative middle school, which opened this month, is incorporating the curriculum into its program. Also, a middle school in Springfield is trying Medford's system. Medford schools superintendent Steve Wisely supports the efforts. "Every school district needs curriculum to help youngsters deal with conflicts," Wisely says. "It's all about teaching how to make good decisions." Both he and Bradshaw note that the instructions give students skills they can use the rest of their lives. The Medford curriculum is designed to be presented by teachers in the course of classroom work. It focuses on simple ways to confront and dissolve disagreements, get groups to work cooperatively and solve problems. Curriculum packets contain outlines for lessons, games and guidelines for setting up peer mediation sessions. Young students can make fingerprints and compile them in a fingerprint tree to illustrate how everyone is an individual. Then, through discussion, they can discover their similarities -- everything from eye color to the things that make them happy. High school students study leadership skills and work out ways to get along in a group. One portion of the lesson guide explores how group members have to balance cooperation, competition and aggression to succeed. Bradshaw knows the lessons are effective. In just a few weeks after she led the first sessions years ago, playground discipline reports -- incidents serious enough to go the the principal -- dropped by half. In four months, such fights were down by 80 percent. And she could hear even the youngest students using the simple four-step approach to handling disputes peacefully. Kids were taught to tell the offender they didn't like what he or she was doing; tell the person to stop; walk away; get some adult help. "You can hear them saying those things when you walk down the hallway," says Bradshaw. For more information about the program, call Bradshaw in the district's conflict resolution office, 776-8734. Today's Edition : News | Sports | Business | Weather | Tempo | Classifieds Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 2000, Medford, Oregon USA