By Kaitlyn Geiger
CCN Correspondent

CRESTLINE — A Crestline school administrator informed the Crestline Board of Education her desire to resign after the 2018-19 school year.

Crestline Exempted Village Schools Superintendent Ms. Noreen Mullens, handed in her resignation. The resignation will be effective July 2019.

The board was disappointed upon the receival of her resignation but wish her the best.

During the meeting, board members had representatives from Village Network discuss what the group is and what they do in the school.

The Village Network representatives said they want to get the Crestline staff into NMT training, which is training to help their teachers help students who may, for example, have rough home lives, and can’t learn like other children.

It was explained that for children, if they have a rough home life or have been or are in traumatic events, their brains cannot always learn like someone else’s who has not had similar experiences.

There are different stages: calm, alert, alarm, fear, and terror. A child learns best in the calm stage and may still learn in the alert stage, but anything past alarm, their brain is focused on anything other than learning, the representatives said.

It was also explained that if a child is in any stage past alarm, they cannot typically be reasoned with as they cannot comprehend; an individual with the child must resort to another tactic to calm them down, like yoga breathing, so the adult can get the student to a point where he or she may be rationalized with and eventually taken back into the calm state.

The training is to make sure that as a student’s emotions rise, the teacher remains calm because if the child is highly emotional and misbehaving and the teacher gets too angry and yells, it only escalates the situation and makes matters worse, according to Village Network representatives.

Village Network also has an onsite helper, who the students may go and talk to if they wish to do so.

Next in the meeting, was a student let committee called the Bulldogs Voice Committee.

The committee includes Taylor Garrison-Wise, president and junior class representative; Kelsey Stone, vice-president and senior class representative; Spenser Lee, secretary and junior class representative; Frances Clark, treasurer and senior class representative; Erin Makenna and Alivia Wise as sophomore representatives; and Amya Birmingham and Emma Kirby as freshmen representatives.

These students formed the committee when they saw a need for help in their school.

They gave what board members called very sad and eye-opening statistics on suicide: suicide is the third leading cause of death among young people and bullying victims are two to nine percent more likely to consider suicide than non-victims. For every suicide, there are at least one hundred attempts. On average, 160,000 students stay home from school every year because of bullying.

The group has lined up a rapper by the name of Beacon Light, who does not swear, to speak at the school Nov. 13 at an assembly titled, “Love the Haters.”

The board members said they are very proud of this set of young people and their actions to step up and help those who have been bullied, and to hopefully stop bullying at their school.