PHOTOS COURTESY OF CHIME CHARTER MIDDLE SCHOOL
A Bully-Free
School
At this urban middle
school, building a
positive school climate
is priority number one.
Wendy W. Murawski,
Jennifer Lockwood,
Abbie Khalili,
and Adrienne Johnston
CHIME Charter Middle School (CCMS) was founded on the premise of diversity and inclusion. Our charter requires that
20 percent of our student body be
composed of students with cognitive,
physical, social, or behavioral disabilities. Located in the Los Angeles Unified
School District in California, CCMS is
like other middle schools—students
sometimes make fun of one another,
engage in bullying, and otherwise act
like middle school students. But our
staff has actively and collaboratively
addressed those issues through three
practical sets of strategies. The results
have been a decrease in bullying and an
increase in positive behaviors.
Environmental Strategies
Signage
To set the right tone, one of our first
actions was to post signs around the
school promoting a safe environment.
To ensure buy-in, we asked the student
council and the school’s leadership
committee to help make, post, and
enforce the signs. A typical sign reads,
“This is a violence-free, abuse-free, and
