Breakfast Club has always been seen as a group of people that helps bring kindness and unity to students, but their most recent endeavor has been specifically for the middle schools in LPS. They have been teaching middle schoolers about being aware that each person is an individual and will have different beliefs, opinions and struggles.

To help spread this message, Breakfast Club uses activities called the “I Am Wall” and anti-bullying camps. Both activities give middle school students the chance to express themselves and meet other people who may have been dealing with similar situations. It also helps destroy boundaries that may be separating students due to cliques and beliefs that one person is better than another because of certain characteristics they may hold.

“The Breakfast Club tries to get middle schoolers to reach out beyond the comfort of their little group of friends and get to know more and different types of kids,” teacher Bruce Failla said. “The wall and the other diversity work we did in the first semester are a vital part of our efforts to help the middle schoolers get a jump start on this helpful social maturity.”

The “I Am Wall” is an activity where middle school students are each given a slip of paper to write a quality that they have and are proud of. After all the middle school students are finished, they put them all up on a giant wall to see the different qualities each person has.

“It’s really to just show that people identify themselves in many different ways, but each aspect can make up this much bigger thing when they come together like the wall,” sophomore Kayla Jones said. “It also shows kids that it’s alright to be different and to accept difference in others.”

In the anti-bullying training camps Breakfast Club talked about the different ways to help prevent bullying and what to do in a situation where they or another person is being bullied. They describe what to do by using techniques and stories.

“Techniques are just the skills they can use in a bad situation; if they saw a friend getting pushed around, they now know the best way to handle it,” junior Mallory Vickers said. “It’s just important that kids know how to do things like this because we want to make sure they aren’t bystanders, letting whatever happens happen.”

The high school’s Breakfast Club representatives talked to the middle schoolers about times when they had changed some aspect of themselves to fit into someone else’s view of how a ‘popular person’ should be.

“We all come in and start talking about how important it is to not try to be something you’re not and to prove that we understand putting up a false act, we talk about times in our lives where we felt like we had to change ourselves to fit the status quo,” senior Allison Niemeier said. “It’s to connect with everybody and show we aren’t just there because we have to be.”