Introduction
Academic institutions are constantly being restructured. With the continuous budget cuts, in many public schools in the state of California, districts are often faced with the burden of restructuring their school district. Many institutions find themselves having to merge elementary schools and junior high schools, thereby becoming kinder to 8th grade hybrids. Although this may save a district some money in running additional buildings, there are at least some social costs that may arise with this merge. One of the biggest problems has to do with conflicts that arise intra grade levels. Having a wider spread of ages, levels of maturation, and varied development, all confined within a single facility will inevitably lead to problems.
Furthermore, many children of low social economic status are often exposed to violence at a young age, due to their immediate surroundings. This exposure to violence at times may lead to an increase in aggressive and hostile behavior.
In order to help ameliorate some of the social ills that are associated with violence, varied counseling programs have been drafted to help public school institutions deal with this growing phenomena. One of those programs is Second Step. Second Step is a social learning curriculum that focuses on problem solving and anger management. Although schools are encouraged to incorporate curricula such as these into the classroom, they are rarely used. Part of this reason, has to do with the fact that classroom teachers are focusing on teaching the core curriculum that the test requires. Second Step’s curriculum is heavily focused on teaching students via observational modeling. In accordance with Bandura’s Social Learning theory, students will aquire social skills and techniques by watching others navigate through difficult situations. The vignettes provided by the curriculum will give students solutions to the many problems dealing with anger and potentially violent outbursts....