Record-Eagle staff writer
BUCKLEY - Cheyenne Landers
thinks the effort to end school
violence can begin with three
words: It starts here.
For the past week the
13-year-old seventh-grader has
been writing those words onto
pieces of white posterboard and
hanging them in her school and
church for people to sign their
names to.
"Her hope is that people, by
signing the poster, will own the
fact that if any difference is going
to happen, it starts with each one
of us," said Brian Rafferty, her pastor at Grant United Methodist
Church.
Landers said she started her poster campaign as a way of making
something positive come from the April 20 school massacre that left
a dozen students, one teacher and two teen-aged gunmen dead at
Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo.
"It kind of made me think of my school," she said. "If no one else
is doing this, I at least have to try to do something."
Three posters hang in the Buckley Community School, and two
more hang at the Corner Store and the Grant United Methodist
Church. All five are covered with the signatures of parents, students
and community members.
Seventh-grader Ashley Shelton signed her name to the poster
hanging in the entrance to the school in big, four inch-high letters as a
statement, she said.
"The world today is just all crime, and I want it stopped," she said.
"I'm scared to go to school sometimes because maybe there's some
kid in school who's trying to be like that other school."
Cheyenne said she hopes the poster campaign will make a
difference by getting people involved in the life of the community and
especially the lives of the children in the community.
"We're the ones who raise the kids," she said. "And we're the
ones who make them understand."
Rafferty said that even though it does not offer any specific plans
for change, Cheyenne's poster campaign is a significant first step
toward moving Buckley away from the "dead center" of shock and
grief.
"I think the message there is that something needs to change,"
he said. "I'm very impressed that someone so young recognized that
fact."
Cheyenne's mother, Nancy Landers, said she is proud of how her
daughter has responded to a situation that is difficult, even for adults,
to understand.
"There's just not any answers," she said. "You don't expect to
have to deal with this kind of thing with your children here. They
shouldn't have to worry about being unsafe, especially at school."
Cheyenne said the poster campaign has already spread to
Kingsley and Mesick, and she would like to see it spread to Traverse
City and other areas in northern Michigan as well.
"As long as I've got poster boards, I'll keep making them," she
said. She quickly added that she wouldn't mind if other people
borrowed her idea.
"It's really a big job for someone to do on their own," she said.
