LEWISTON — Bridget McAlonan walks into kindergarten classes all over Androscoggin County carrying blue hula-hoop-like “spaceships” and encourages 5-year-olds to step inside them and explore their personal space.

By the time they’re in third grade, the same children play a game with the spaceships and a maze of tape: Stay together in a group, but maintain your personal space, she tells them, “but you can’t mess up my maze. They have to figure out how to hold themselves together without pushing themselves or each other around, and not run into other groups. They end up holding onto each other and holding each other together.”

McAlonan is an educator with the Sexual Assault Crisis Center in Lewiston. She and fellow educator Molly Nelson work with students in nearly every classroom in every public school in Androscoggin County; with youths at New Beginnings, a home for runaway and homeless youths; Genesis House, a center for teenage boys with mental health diagnoses; and with Bates College students.

From her office recently, McAlonan explained the goal of her program, which she described as “consent education.”

By the time the third-graders she has worked with reach seventh and eighth grade, the conversation will have evolved, she said. Ideally, the kids will trust her and be comfortable enough to discuss consent, harassment and sexual violence.

Since child sexual abuse scandals involving the Rev. Robert Carlson in Maine and assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky of Penn State in Pennsylvania hit the news, advocates and educators have increased efforts to educate children and adults on how to prevent tragedy and how to support survivors.

“One in four girls and one in six boys are estimated to be victims of sexual assault,” McAlonan said. She has worked with children in Androscoggin County for five years, she said.

“If I can let a child know that they have the right to have personal space and that if they have had that space transgressed someone will listen, perhaps they will be able to get help sooner,” she said. “The sooner the trauma is addressed the more likely the person is able to heal.”

And McAlonan finds that students she worked with five years ago in middle school classrooms now frequently take her aside in the halls of a local high school and tell her, “‘I need to talk to you.'” And they’ll talk, she said, “about everything.”

Curriculum

McAlonan, who has a master’s degree in education and experience in social justice, teaching and advocacy for children, designed the Sexual Assault Crisis Center curriculum.

As students get older, the presentations begin to address rumors, harassment and Internet safety. They’ve found that sixth-graders have already encountered pornography, whether “they’ve gone surfing for it” or have had pictures sent to them. 

“I have kids come up to me and say, ‘Can you help me change my (privacy) settings? Someone sent me this picture,’” Nelson said.

Students have often surfed for pornography by this age, according to McAlonan, even on their school laptops, and even though administrators attempt to block such sites.

So the team has been asked to talk to kids about the impact of media in general, focusing on ads such as one for McDonald’s, picturing a triathlete who says he eats the fast food frequently.

“They say, ‘What? No way,’” McAlonan said. “I say, ‘So now, let’s talk about what you’re looking at online. (The kids say), ‘Ohhh, they’re putting two things together that probably aren’t true.’ So they’re slowly undoing that programming. I tell them, ‘If you want to look at it, that’s fine, but you need to know the impacts.’”

The concept of sexual violence is introduced in seventh  and eighth grades, and by high school, the duo talks about safety when dating and what to do in the event of an assault.

But invariably, McAlonan said, kids approach them with other issues because they trust them, she said, and they direct them to appropriate resources.

‘Consent’

In some schools, the educators work with prekindergartners, gearing the lessons and the language to 4- and 5-year-olds. 

“Bridget does a nice job; she really does,” said Brian Albert, principal of Libby-Tozier and Carrie Ricker elementary schools in the Litchfield-Sabattus-Wales district. McAlonan also works with students at Oak Hill Middle School in Wales.

In older elementary classrooms, McAlonan talks about the game tag, and asks the students where, in the game, they’re allowed to “tag” someone.

“I say, ‘Can you touch people on their heads?’ No, that’s against the rules. This simply brings in (the concept) that you can’t do this, you do have permission to touch somebody here (she touches her arm), or maybe on the middle of their back — you do have ‘consent’ — we use that word,” she said. “They may not get it, but they’ve heard it. That’s slowly building (the concept) that you have consent to do this only if it’s safe and fun for everybody.”

Parents are alerted in a newsletter that McAlonan will be working with their children on such issues as personal space.

Still, Albert acknowledged that, particularly when they hear the name of McAlonan’s agency, Sexual Assault Crisis Center, “Some of her work can be controversial with some parents. They question whether it’s something the school should be doing. But we’re very up front with parents and I don’t think we’ve really had anybody who’s (objected). She’s been coming in for a couple of years and people are just used to her.”

Controversy

The program is not offered in some Androscoggin County schools, however, including some in Auburn and Elm Street School in Mechanic Falls. In those schools, Lewiston-based Advocates for Children works in some classrooms.

According to that agency’s website, they offer presentations on such topics as personal body safety, physical, emotional and sexual abuse prevention, bullying prevention and problem-solving.

McAlonan and Nelson surmise that fear surrounding their organization’s name may be among the causes they have not been asked to present in those schools.

“We go to schools and say, ‘We’d like to talk to your kids about personal space,’” McAlonan said. “Before second grade, I don’t even say (the agency’s name). I just say I work for an agency that helps … I don’t ever talk about sexual assault. At third grade, we start saying, ‘I work for the Sexual Assault Crisis Center, and that sounds scary, but you’ve known me for the past couple of years and I’m not a scary person.’ I never talk directly about abuse until fourth grade, although if they bring it up, I will fold their concerns into the presentation.”

Auburn Superintendent Katy Grondin said last week that most of what SACC offers in its presentations is taught in health classes in Auburn schools, although Advocates for Children has worked in the schools recently.

McAlonan said they do not visit classrooms at Elm Street School in Mechanic Falls, in RSU 16, after “a problem several years back” during a presentation to eighth-graders about sexual harassment. When that conversation suddenly included offensive words, McAlonan acknowledges that she “inadvertently” said a specific word as an example of “a word that could be hurtful … and triggers a lot of people,” although she said she doesn’t “have a hard time with the word.”

Still, she said, “That was it. After that presentation, there was resistance and a very strained relationship. We did a debrief and I said, ‘I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to be offensive,’ but they said, ‘I can’t believe you said that word.’ I said, ‘There’s other words out there that if you say them, they can be much more hurtful than just this word.’”

Nelson did return for presentations, and the guidance counselor from the school has since called for services, the team said.

But Carol Lundberg, the social worker at Elm Street School in Mechanic Falls, said Tuesday that SACC no longer works with students at the Elm Street School due to “scheduling conflicts.”

Instead, Lundberg teaches a 12- or 13-week course to students in kindergarten through third grades, based on a curriculum from the Seattle-based organization Committee for Children, and fourth- and sixth-graders work with Advocates for Children.

Lundberg said students learn about different forms of “touching” as well as safety skills, including fire prevention and bike helmets.

“What I love about it is that from the very beginning, it focuses on unwanted touching and talking and how to deal with it,” she said.

‘Drop-in’

McAlonan and Nelson also offer “drop-in” hours at least once a week at public high schools and some middle schools and junior high schools in Androscoggin County.

During those sessions, students can schedule time to speak to them privately.

Frequently, guidance counselors, school resource officers and even custodians will tell her, “’I need you to go find this kid because they said something to me and I don’t know what to tell them,’” McAlonan said. “Sometimes if a kiddo won’t talk to us, they will talk to someone in the school or they’ll talk to us at the same time.”

Only five years old, McAlonan’s program is untested, she said, largely due to lack of funding. The organization is financed by the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, United Way and federal grants, including the Violence Against Women Act. There’s no money for evaluation.

But she said she sees success in schools, when kids realize “they don’t have to be passive anymore; that it’s supposed to be fair, that they don’t have to be, ‘Oh, you’re just a little kid to be seen and not be heard, or don’t even be seen.’ (They realize), you get to be here, you get to say what you need and what feels fun and safe.”

McAlonan said abstract concepts such as personal space are difficult to understand, particularly for younger children, and “require a lot of buy-in from the teachers. It’s scary for some teachers, but in the schools we have a presence in, especially the Lewiston schools, it’s a nonissue.”

Teachers in RSU 4 schools in the Sabattus area also have “bought in” to the program, according to Principal Brian Albert, who said his teachers are “very comfortable with” McAlonan’s work and understand and “reinforce it … so it becomes part of real practice, part of their toolbox that they carry around.”

Success is also more likely, McAlonan said, when her work doesn’t happen in a vacuum. 

“If I just show up once, and they’re never going to hear it again, then it’s not going to work,” she said. “But if it’s being repeated by their teachers, if it’s being repeated by their peers, if it’s being repeated by the principal, it’s going to help someone.”

What: 12th annual Celebrity Waiter Dinner to support the Sexual Assault Crisis Center

When: 6 to 9 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 25

Where: Martindale Country Club, 527 Beech Hill Road, Auburn.

Who: Celebrity waiters, including Barry Schmieks and Liz Allen of the Auburn Police Department, Maureen Aube of the Androscoggin Chamber of Commerce, Jeremy Rush of Gleason Radio, Maine state legislator Michael Carey, Mike Blais of Blais Florist and The Gym, Auburn Mayor Jonathan LaBonte, Adrienne Kramer of Girl Power Fitness, Mitchell Clyde Thomas of Community Little Theatre, Deputy Chief Jim Minkowsky of the Lewiston Police Department, Joshua Shea and Molly McGill of Lewiston Auburn Magazine and Rita Myrick of Maine Cycle/Skier’s Edge.

Cost: $30 each or $250 for a table of 10. 

Info: 784-5272.

Sexual Assault Crisis Center contacts

Web: sexualassaultcrisiscenter.org
Facebook: www.facebook.com/saccmaine
Twitter: twitter.com/saccmaine
Statewide 24-hour hot line: 1-800-871-7741