Caitlin Prater-Haacke is an 11th grade student at George McDougal High School in Airdrie, Canada. Last month, someone reportedly broke into her locker and used “her iPad to post a message on her Facebook account, telling her to kill herself.” That’s a horrifying thing for anyone to experience, but Prater-Haacke used the situation to take a creative stand against bullying.
This past Monday, the student wrote “positive messages on 840 Post-it notes” and left them around school. According to Mic, the messages included phrases like “You’re awesome” and “You’re beautiful.”
Why did the 11th grader feel inspired to do something so awesome? She told the Calgary Sun that bullying is “not necessarily addressed, and people get really down about it;” it was “due time” someone did “something positive.”
See, when Prater-Haacke was bullied, her school didn’t do anything, according to her mother. And what did the school do when she tried to take a creative stand against bullying? They reprimanded her for littering.
Thankfully, her story was so inspiring that other students took her lead. They began posting their own positive notes using the #PositivePostit hashtag. Even the mayor of Prater-Haacke’s town commended her efforts. He called her positive messages “a great initiative,” and he declared Thursday “the city’s official Positive Post-It Day, encouraging students and residents to leave uplifting notes for each other.”
To find out how you can play a role in putting an end to bullying, head over to StopBullying.gov. You can also take part in DoSomething.org’s Bleep Out Bullying campaign below!
Photo: (Yahoo! via Mic)