He likely has no idea the role he played, but a little boy at Esquimalt’s Lampson Elementary helped kick-start one of the most successful anti-bullying programs in Canada more than 20 years ago.
And he did it by getting in a fair bit of trouble.
“I remember the little guy vividly,” says Judi Stevenson, the school’s former principal. “He spent a lot of time in my office.”
On one of the visits, Stevenson took a look at the boy’s report card from a previous school and noticed that the teacher had written at the bottom that he needed to use his WITS.
“What does this mean?” she asked him.
“I dunno,” the boy said, perhaps explaining why he ended up in the office so frequently.
Intrigued, Stevenson called his former school and spoke to the principal, who told her that WITS was an acronym used by one of the teachers there and that it stood for: Walk away, Ignore, Talk it out, Seek help.
The acronym stuck with Stevenson and she began using it at Lampson as a way to help students resolve conflicts.
“It was something that kids understood,” she said.
“It was easy to remember. They knew what it meant and we could just keep reinforcing it.”
Teachers modelled it in the classroom, Stevenson highlighted it at assemblies and WITS posters lined the hallways.
Tom Woods says that’s where he saw the acronym for the first time.
“They had a poster on the wall: ‘Remember to use your WITS,’ ” he says. “I remember it clearly. It was Sampson the Lampson Lion.”
At the time, Woods was a school liaison officer with Esquimalt police and one of the co-founders of Rock Solid, an anti-violence program started by law enforcement officials, some of whom also happened to be champion lacrosse players with the Mann Cup-winning Victoria Shamrocks.
Rock Solid launched in the fall of 1997 following a wave of youth violence across Greater Victoria. The program gained prominence after the killing of 14-year-old Reena Virk later that year and researchers at the University of Victoria soon took notice.
“They were happy with what we were doing, but they said: ‘How are you addressing this with younger kids in their most formative years?’ ” Woods recalled.
He remembered the poster at Lampson Elementary and reached out to Stevenson to find out more. The two of them agreed that WITS likely had broader appeal and soon got the school district onside.
Teachers and counsellors provided input, and UVic psychology professor Bonnie Leadbeater joined the team to develop WITS into a professional program and evaluate its effectiveness — something that proved crucial to its success, Stevenson said.
“We needed to say: ‘Look, this isn’t a fluffy, fly-by-night cutesy thing; this is a program that will help children.’ ”
The program had two things going for it from the outset.
First, it was community-based, with police officers, teachers, counsellors and university researchers all contributing, Woods said.
Second, it was designed so that teachers could deliver the WITS lessons without adding to their daily workload.
“It was based on easily accessible library books and was put together in a fashion so that a teacher could — as all primary teachers do — read to their children,” Stevenson said.
“The program outlined the exact title and the kind of questions you could ask children while you were reading: ‘Well, what could Johnny have done? Could he have used his WITS? Which one of his WITS do you think would have worked?’ ”
Woods and his colleagues drove home the message at school assemblies by swearing in all the students as special WITS constables.
And Leadbeater’s research showed that the program did reduce bullying in schools by giving kids the tools to resolve conflicts and get help.
“They can say: ‘I’m using my WITS!’ or “Are you using your WITS?’ ” Leadbeater explained. “But they kind of have at least a beginning.
“Whereas before I don’t think kids [did]. They were worried about being a tattletale or a rat. They didn’t really know quite what you were supposed to do if somebody was hurting you.”
In 2016, Dalhousie University announced that its researchers had reviewed seven popular bullying-prevention programs and that only one — WITS — could be recommended for use in schools.
“We found that WITS delivers stronger effects than other programs at a lower cost, and shows long-term benefits,” researcher Ashley Chisholm said at the time. “The program also has components that promote healthy relationships.”
Now in its 20th year, WITS has been introduced to more than 180,000 children across Canada, and more than 700 schools have received the program’s materials, according to the WITS Programs Foundation.
Schools in Hong Kong, England and the United States have taken an interest, and a group of teachers in Brazil is working with Leadbeater to translate the program to Portuguese.
“I’m really excited,” Leadbeater said. “I don’t think that there is — even yet — this kind of a Canadian program out there for children.
“I do feel like it’s a very Canadian program. It’s very much around creating safe environments.”
Leadbeater said her only frustration is that governments — after investing money to develop and test the program — have not done more to make sure it reaches as many students as possible.
“We have great partnerships with the RCMP and Red Cross to help us disseminate it, but again, we have this constant struggle for funding,” she said.
Still, Leadbeater said the program has come a long way since those terrible days in the aftermath of Reena Virk’s murder.
“We’re very aware of what things looked like then and what things look like now, and we think that we’re all better for having done this work with the WITS program,” she said.
Woods said he never expected the program to take off the way it did.
“I think you just start out with a thought that you might help one kid at a time and that would be a success,” he said. “If it grows from there, then it’s just a bonus, right?”
Certainly, Stevenson, now retired, was just trying to help one little boy who kept showing up in her office on Lampson Street all those years ago.
“I think it was just one of those things that was supposed to happen,” she said.
“I don’t know, every once in a while in your life something just happens and you say: ‘OK, this is right. This is what needs to happen.’
“And it was. It was good for kids and that’s always been my bottom line. If it’s good for kids, this is something we have to do.”
