Students from the nursing department gave an anti-bully presentation for about 75 fourth- to seventh-grade students at St. Gregory Elementary in Houma last Friday. The PowerPoint presentation was part of a class project for Nursing 420, Community Health Nursing.

“We were given a general topic, violence in the community,” Sam Obgartel, nursing senior from Houma, said. “From there we narrowed it down to school bullying because we have all had experiences with bullying and because of the recent school shootings.”

Obgartel, Justin Chaisson, Emily Fanguy, Kimberley Elliott, Ashlee Howard and Howard Broussard, all nursing seniors, titled their presentation “Encourage, Don’t Discourage.”

The students who attended the presentation each signed an anti-bullying pledge asking them to “encourage and never discourage their fellow students.” Obgartel said the pledge encouraged students to be “contenders in life and not pretenders.”

“We encouraged them to stand up against a bully,” Obgartel said.

The elementary students were required to fill out a survey on bullying prepared by the nursing students.

“As part of the project, we had to assess the problem, and the best way to do that is with a survey,” Obgartel said.

In the survey, 60 percent of the students said they had been victims of bullying, and 76 said they had seen a fellow student being bullied. Ninety-one percent said teachers tried to stop bullying from happening, and 75 percent said they felt safe at school.

The nursing students used the Internet to research bullying. Obgartel said Louisiana does very little to discourage bullying. He said they took most of their information from sites in Colorado.

“Colorado became really serious about bullying after Columbine,” Obgartel said. “They are really proactive, not reactive. A lot of other states are copying what Colorado is doing.”

The PowerPoint presentation combined video and cartoons. It explained how to keep from getting bullied and how to protect others from being bullied. It also gave examples of the dangers of bullying, like school shootings.

The presentation was filled with clips of children talking about how bullying affected their lives. Some confessions were children who were victims of bullying, and some were of kids who had bullied in the past.

“It was really snappy,” Obgartel said. “We set the whole thing to music because we didn’t want the kids to get bored. We were getting them out of class, so they did not want to hear us lecture for an hour.”

Student community projects are an integral part of the nursing curriculum, according to Shirleen Trabeaux, assistant professor of nursing.

“They help students to get the big picture,” Trabeaux said. “We ask them to look at their community and find the strengths and weaknesses.”

Trabeaux said apathy among communities is a serious problem nationally. She hopes projects like this will raise awareness about community activism.