WASHOUGAL — The boys gathered round in the back of the sheriff’s office armored vehicle and bandaged a puppet arm that spurted blood. Others took shifts doing chest compressions on a CPR dummy. Another group built a makeshift shelter from pine boughs.
It was the 101-level coursework for Man U, or Man University, where Washougal School District eighth-grade boys practiced life skills and team building late Thursday afternoon at Jemtegaard Middle School
Organizer Travis Liston said the idea came up when Jemtegaard Principal David Cooke approached him about doing something for the boys in the district.
Cooke knew Liston is a scoutmaster, and saw a dramatic turnaround in one of the boys at Jemtegaard after the boy attended one of Liston’s scouting camps.
Whatever you did with him, he told Liston, we need more of it.
“I’ll get 10 fathers, engaged dads, and we’ll come down here and try to figure out a really cool event that these boys could be really excited about,” Liston said.
The afternoon started with a round of tug-of-war in the field in front of the middle school.
Then the boys rotated between different activities where local fathers and other volunteers guided them through activities such as changing electrical outlets, scaling a climbing wall or replacing a tire.
As they moved from activity to activity, the boys got a new hole punched in their “man cards.” A full card earned a boy pizza and some swag at the end of the evening.
Eighty-one eighth-grade boys, out of about 120 in the district, participated.
“It’s amazing. It’s really fun. There’ a lot of people out here and a lot of people in the community who want to be here,” said Jemtegaard eighth-grader Dalton Payne.
He was eying the next activity in the rotation — the sheriff’s office armored car — and said all the boys seemed to be enjoying meeting new kids from the district’s two middle schools.
“It’s just cool to see kids who aren’t in certain groups come alive and come together,” he said.
The man cards and other manly trappings were a bit of a conceit: The larger goal is to create quality connections between the students to help prepare them for the coming few years.
“We’re really preparing them for high school, that’s the goal,” Liston said. “When they go to high school, there’s a lot of these (boys) that will get lost.”
Liston is also a football coach for many of the kids, and said a lot of them don’t have good male role models in their life.
“I know many of these boys are struggling, and they need something positive,” he said.
Cooke and Liston aren’t alone in their concern for how boys fare at school.
Educators and researchers worry more boys nationwide are struggling in school, in contrast to gains made over the past decades by their female peers over nagging gaps such as lower female representation in science and math classes.
Department of Education numbers how boys tend to make up a larger share of students held back a year or who are suspended or expelled, or who drop out.
With a few exceptions, boys are taking fewer Advanced Placement programs than their female peers, and they’re enrolling in college after high school less often.
Cooke and Liston said they hope to have a few more similar events, 202 and 303 courses, through the year, including the same activities and skill-building exercises. A similar program for the district’s eighth-grade girls starts in January.
Cooke said they’d like to hold an etiquette dinner for the boys, and maybe invite girls from the high school to talk about expectations and behavior as the boys enter the dating game.
Eighth grade is a critical time for boys, Cooke said, as they prepare to move on to high school.
“One of the reasons kids make poor decisions, whether it’s not take their grades seriously or get involved in drugs and stuff like that, is they don’t have a good support system,” Cooke said. “If I can spread the support system among all these boys and build leaders among the boys, then the chances of them not getting involved in bad things greatly increases.”
Liston pointed at a group of boys struggling to get over a climbing wall and said it was a metaphor for the whole project.
“They can’t do it on their own, they’re getting over with help from another friend, and that is really, really big,” Liston said. “If they work together they can accomplish some really cool stuff.”
