On Tuesday Sept. 30, eight Lafayette students, along with Assistant Principal Mandy Lewis and a parent chaperon, Denise Foley, attended the CharacterPlus Student Summit to begin the student-led campaign, “Character Goes Viral: Students Stop Cyberbullying.” Students met to create a social media campaign to stop cyberbullying. Lafayette was the only Rockwood school present.

Students collaborated on how to properly end cyberbullying using social media and created a hashtag for the movement, #StartsWithUs.

The St. Louis Rams will be partnering up with CharacterPlus for this campaign. The spokesperson for the campaign is Chris Long, defensive end for the Rams, who will help the campaign gain momentum.

Sophomore Franco Noseda, who attended Student Summit, believes that anyone can help put an end to bullying, hence the name of the hashtag.

“It all starts with one person wanting to make a difference. It’s incredible how people can get persuaded to do things,” Noseda said.

On Thursday Oct. 16, students began their campaign launch, taking “The Clothes Pin Challenge.”  The idea of this challenge is to write positive messages on a clothes pin along with #StartsWithUs. The phrase “post and pass” is also written on one side of the pin to direct students to use the hashtag on social media.

The campaign launch appeared to be successful. In fact, #StartsWithUs was used in 2,450 tweets and reached 11,947,913 timelines in a 24 hour time period from 11:26 a.m. on Oct. 16 to 11:26 a.m. on Oct. 17.

According to senior Sarah Rao, another attendee of the Student Summit, the experience benefitted students and staff alike as well as spread a positive message.

“Even with something as simple as clothes pins, we spread so much positivity. Posting about this on social media really got students and staff into it. I’m so glad we can take a global idea and incorporate it in a way that people will pay attention to,” Rao said.

Junior Allison Hallums was pinned on Thursday and appreciates the idea that the issue of bullying is being brought to the high school level.

“I first realized the pin when I looked down at my backpack. I thought this was a cool idea to bring into school. I like the message to stop bullying because I know that bullying is sometimes treated like an elementary problem, but it is happening in high schools as well,” Hallums said.

Hallums believes wholeheartedly in the idea of #StartsWithUs.

“I think it does start with us,” she said, “One school can definitely make a difference in the fight to stop bullying.”