GREAT MILLS, Md. – Community Mediation of St. Mary’s continuing conflict-management programs throughout the county have now expanded into Great Mills High School, working directly with students in the school.
“They took the initiative to start student-to-student peer mediation,” Mia Bowers, the mediation center’s executive director, said of the school in central St. Mary’s. “We’re going to be in their school, one day a week.”
The new on-campus offering at Great Mills expands the center’s longstanding outreach to all St. Mary’s students from kindergarten through their senior year, and to their parents, including facilitating meetings where team members create individual education plans (IEP).
Student-to-student peer mediation addresses the need for immediate conflict resolution resources in schools. Mediators work with students, teachers and parents to reduce violence and resolve conflict by providing a peaceful and collaborative problem-solving process.
The school-related mediation services have long been available through self-referrals from parents or teachers, but Great Mills’ administration is the first to work directly with the mediation center, Bowers said at the center’s recently expanded office on Courthouse Drive in Leonardtown.
“Great Mills is excited to identify students for peer-to-peer mediation,” Bowers said. “We (also) will be training students to become mediators.”
Another school-support service offered by the center, several of which were listed in a Commission on the School-to-Prison Pipeline report as restorative interventions, focuses on attendance mediation. Responding to the challenges of truancy brings together parents and teachers to identify underlying issues, addresses the complex factors that cause truancy for a particular child, and develops a collaborative plan to address those issues. Good attendance is critical to academic success, and students who are truant are more likely to drop out, become involved with the juvenile justice system and become victims of crime. Patterns of truancy begin early and are highly predictive of future academic and social struggles. During attendance mediations, families often are made aware of resources available to support them within the school and community.
Bowers said the center’s volunteer mediators also take part in facilitating after-school programs, in partnership with Pyramid Health Care’s youth community center, The Cove, located in Lexington Park. Pyramid’s PosiTeen program and Building Bridges, a separate nonprofit entity, both “provide enrichment to students,” Bowers said, including skills building and support with homework.
The services also are available to assist home-schooled children and their families, Bowers said, all part of the mediation center’s broader mission to empower people of all ages to talk with each other to find solutions.
“It’s helping students learn how to deal with conflict, and avoid it in the future,” she said.
For more information on the center, its free mediation services and outreach programs, and how to support this nonprofit organization, go online to http://www.communitymediationSMC.org or call 301-475-9118.
