prosportscc.com

The P.R.O. S.T.Y.L.E. Program is a pilot program designed to help change in a positive way, the attitudes of the students, faculty, staff, and community as it relates to “bullying” and “violence”. In essence, this is a program that has as its focus, the promotion of “pro-social” behavior.

The program itself takes its shape from a unique Bully Prevention initiative called the Olweus Program, which was introduced as a violence prevention tool in middle school aged children. The Olweus Program Model (created in Northwestern Europe) believes “success for a program like this is predicated on getting the students themselves to buy into positive cultural change instead of presenting it as having come to them by the parents or teachers. Once they accept it as  their own possibility, you can then begin training them as leaders and ultimately equip them to go out and positively influence their peers!”

Thus the P.R.O. S.T.Y.L.E. program begins by selecting and educating student leaders about violence and the role that bullying plays in many acts of violence.  The next level of the program is the intense training of a core group of students at a given school. The training is for general leadership but focuses on motivation, self-esteem, college/career preparation, cultural identity, and other relevant forms of personal achievement. 

This training is combined with specific anti-bullying or pro-social information including ways to identify, survey, and research anti-social behaviors in a school or community and later developing skills or locating services to combat these behaviors. 

Finally, the students (who lead the change as opposed to the faculty, staff, or adults) go out and begin to initiate activities in their environment that promotes, educates, and cultivates a “violence-free” and “bully-free” (pro-social behavior) environment.

It is important to remember that the key to this initiative is that it is “student-led” and not something that is ordained by the adults.  The P.R.R.O.S.T.Y.L.E. program believes that the architects of change and the resulting interaction must be student-to-student in order to be successful. The adults just provide the environmental infrastructure such as resources (training, supplies, time, support, etc).

Partners for the P.R.O.S.T.Y.L.E. Program:  The School District of Philadelphia's Office of School Climate & Safety (OSCS), Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), Pro Sports Community Consults (PSCC), and the Willie Green Foundation (WGF).