Merino Junior High and High School combined fun and games with important discussions around processing emotions and living a healthy lifestyle Monday.
Throughout the year, the school’s wellness committee has been hosting “RAMlympics” days in connection with the Bobby Jones program. For February’s wellness day, seventh through 12th graders engaged in a number of activities including an escape room, ping pong tournament and bat ball, and also enjoyed a collegiate band performance.
Following the fun and games, the students attended a presentation on domestic violence and a Northeast Colorado BOCES School to Work Alliance presentation on soft skills including attitude and attendance, as well as a Bobby Jones presentation. After a pilot program at Merino and other schools last spring, this school year Jones has partnered with Merino, Peetz and Fleming School District to provide his Peer Purpose Mentorship Program, which is designed to help students understand how to live a healthy lifestyle and give them the proper tools to overcome the roadblocks in life.
For the program, which Logan County’s Human Services Department is helping to finance, Jones visits the schools weekly to share a new lesson that will ultimately lead the students to feel confident to achieve their greatest goals in life. His main focuses are centered around four general themes: finding your identity, bullying recovery: how to walk out of victimhood, building health relationships (general interpersonal relationships) and foundations of leadership.
Monday, Jones invited students from Peetz to talk about what his program has done at their school and how it’s helped them become one big family.
“The Bobby Jones program has really impacted our school,” said freshman Lyle Schumacher. “You don’t walk around the halls and see the sports group, or the academic group, or the seventh graders – just different people in their own little groups – you don’t see that anymore. Everybody just gets along with everybody and there’s a strong sense of equality, we all see each other as the same.”
Chance Segelke, a sophomore, spoke about getting invested in the program when he saw how much it was helping others around him.
“One thing that this program has done for me personally is I am able to pick out the people in my life who have value,” said senior Makayla Motzkus, explaining that she no longer listens to people who tell her she can’t do what it is she wants to do. “It really has helped me separate the people who I trust; trust has been a big thing for me in working with this program.”
Jones just came to Peetz this year, but Motzkus told the Merino students she wishes they would have had him for longer.
She spoke about coming to Peetz as a freshman and not fitting in well at all during her first two years there, “it was very cliquey, I didn’t feel included there,” Motzkus said. That changed a little bit in her junior year, but this year has been completely different. “It didn’t matter where you came from, what your last name was, everybody had a point and a value.”
“Everybody has a voice there,” added Megan Hawkins, a seventh grader.
Merino students asked the Peetz students what the hardest thing that they had to overcome as a school was. Schumacher said the hardest thing was learning and accepting that everyone has their own voice.
“People I think you could tell that they felt that they had to act a certain way around certain people in order to fit it, but now it gives you a sense of relief where everyone can just do their own thing and not worry about getting judged,” he said.
Alexis Gentry, an eighth grader, added that they had to realize that everyone has their own problems that they’re dealing with and they need to help one another. Part of what Jones is doing with his program is trying to provide students with the tools that they will need to handle the challenges that they might be dealing with.
Jones asked the Peetz students to share what it took for them to get the program to where it is at their school.
“For me acknowledging that we all have struggles and we all have insecurities and that really opened up my eyes,” Schumacher said.
“The big thing that I had to do was look inside, I had to realize why I was feeling the way I was feeling and that it wasn’t someone else’s problem. I had a really big problem with wanting to blame a lot of my insecurities or my own doubts on other people, ‘oh, it’s the way that I was taught,’ ‘oh, it’s the way that my dad talked to me,’ and it truly wasn’t, it was the way that let people walk over me and that came from inside. So, I had to tear down multiple layers, which I did not want to do willingly, Bobby had to keep picking at me, but I overall wish that I would have done it sooner,” Motzkus said.
As a senior, she was concerned that she won’t have this program next year, so she sat down with Jones and asked him how she can bring this with her when she goes off to college, “because I want to share this with other people, if it’s made a difference in my life, it can make a difference in yours,” she said.
Jones applauded the Peetz students for being confident enough to be willing to speak in front of a group of students from another school and for all of the work they’ve done this year.
“I’m very proud of them, they’ve done a very good job in taking this program to the next level,” Jones told the Merino students, encouraging them to embrace the program as Peetz has. ”One of the main goals for this program is to leave it behind and I can only leave it behind as much as someone embraces it. I want you to start looking at this thing differently. I get it, I hear ‘I don’t need it,’ but you need it, you’re going to need it at some point; it might not be today, tomorrow, or next week, but at some point, you’re going to have to know what it’s like to process emotions.”
Jones pointed out that he didn’t have big problems until he got to college.
“It’s because I didn’t have the proper tools to deal with hard things and that’s what I want to equip you with is the proper tools. Maybe you won’t need them right now, but again, how many times do I say you can’t wait until you get somewhere to prepare for it,” he said, telling the students “emotions, we have to learn to start processing emotions better, we have to learn to start opening up better.”
He mentioned getting messages from students asking for help dealing with different things and told the students that they have a program in their school right now that will help them with exactly the things that they were messaging him about and encouraged them to take advantage of it.
“That influence thing is real here and you’ve got to get past that, just because someone else is doing something doesn’t mean it’s okay for you to do it or vice versa,” Jones said to the students.
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