Camp aims to ease stress of students entering middle school

By Emily Richmond

Thursday, Aug. 4, 2005 | 9:29 a.m.

For more than 100 soon-to-be sixth graders, the prospect of their first day of classes at Swainston Middle School became a little less intimidating Wednesday.

"I know where the library is and the gym," said one of them, 11-year-old Hashima Carothers. "This place is big."

Enrollment at Swainston will top 1,600 students when classes resume Aug. 29. More than 400 students drawn from a half-dozen surrounding elementary schools, -- most with total enrollments of between 700 and 900 -- will make up Swainston's sixth-grade class.

Thanks to a $15,000 grant from the Clark County Education Association, about a quarter of those students are spending two weeks familiarizing themselves with the North Las Vegas campus.

The Swainston Transition Camp, the first of its kind in the district, began Monday and runs through next week. All incoming sixth-grade students were invited to attend free of charge.

The Clark County School District has some of the nation's largest campuses, both in physical facilities and enrollment. With no immediate plans to reduce the size and scope of the district's campuses, educators are searching for ways to create the climate of a smaller school.

"Our hope is that some of these students will be leaders when classes start for real and help other kids find their way around," said Swainston Assistant Principal Ed Pfeiffer, who came up with the transition camp idea and wrote the grant application. "At the very least these kids will feel more comfortable and more confident."

The camp sessions, which run from 9:30 a.m. to noon, include workshops on time management and study skills, expectations of teachers, tours of the school's library and tips for handling bullying.

That's welcome news to Rebecca Rovere, a Clark County native whose youngest daughter, Alexis, is attending the transition camp at Swainston.

"This is a lot different than grade school, they have six classrooms instead of just a couple and bunch of new kids from other schools they've never seen before," Rovere said Wednesday. "This (the camp) gives them a couple of weeks to be sixth graders without anyone teasing them or harassing them. They get a jump start, make a few friends and they won't feel so alone."

Rovere said she knows first-hand how tough the transition to middle school can be, both from her own experiences attending Gibson Junior High School, now a middle school, and her older daughter's first weeks at Swainston four years ago.

"She got her eyeglasses knocked off her face walking from one class to the next," Rovere said. "It was just some smart-aleck kids but my daughter was completely unprepared for that kind of behavior."

Margaret Herod, who teaches eighth grade and helped organize the transition camp, said she didn't believe the problems of bullying aren't any worse at Swainston than at other district campuses. However the incoming sixth graders will take part in a workshop about conflict resolution and how to handle bullies, Herod said.

The campus is situated so that the school's eighth graders have little contact with the sixth graders except in the courtyards before and after school, Herod said.

"We try to keep the possibility of bullying to a minimum," Herod said.

The lunchroom is prime territory for potential problems as students jostle in line and older kids cut in front of the younger ones, Herod said. For some new students the process of deciding what to order from the menu, after years of elementary school meals with no choices, can be daunting, Herod said.

"We always end up having to extend the sixth-grade lunch period for the first few weeks until everybody gets their bearings," Herod said.

The transition camp staff met with some of last year's sixth graders to get suggestions for workshops and programs that might be helpful for the new students, Herod said. And the students taking part in the debut camp will be tracked to determine what lessons stuck with them, which would help for the next time around.

"We'd love to make this an annual event," Herod said.

Louis Mortillaro, a Las Vegas psychologist since 1971, said the jump from the relatively protected environment of elementary school to the more independent setting of a middle or junior high school can be dramatic.

"Students that age have so many conflicts ... their voices and their bodies are changing and emotionally they're more easily influenced by peer and group pressures," said Mortillaro, former chief psychologist for the county's juvenile courts. "This is where the predators develop, preying on the weak and stealing their lunch money to make themselves feel better."

Mortillaro said he was glad the school planned to follow the students to study the potential benefits of the program.

"There could be some useful information that comes out of this," he said.

Chase Nelson, who attended Eva Wolfe Elementary School last year, said he was glad most of his closest friends would be attending Swainston with him. But he was also looking forward P.E. class and meeting new people. When asked what he had learned so far in his first three days of the summer transition camp Chase recited Swainston's school motto.

"SOAR -- Safety, Organization, Achievement, Respect," Nelson said. "I sort of knew that already because my sister went here last year but now I'm sure about it."