Saturday, September 27, 2014
By EMMALEE C. TORISK
CAMPBELL
Even after almost 30 years spent teaching at Campbell City Schools, Tula O’Neal remains in awe of the students there.
For one thing, they’re always “willing to go the distance to achieve their goals,” said O’Neal, who teaches health and physical education.
Case in point: The dozen or so high-school students O’Neal hand-picked to take part in Operation Keepsake — a program intended to help young people stay out of trouble and chase their dreams — devoted countless hours of their own time to writing, directing and acting in a film for this year’s Friends4Friends Campaign.
Students are selected based on their leadership ability and strong character.
Now in its third year, the Friends4Friends Campaign helps to heighten awareness of risk behaviors such as teen dating violence and sexting. It also helps students to understand that if they see a friend involved in any of those risk behaviors, they “need to stand up and speak out to get the friend the help they need,” said Deborah Landis, program liaison for Operation Keepsake.
For CMHS students, who elected to tackle drug abuse in their video, filming began in January and ended in July. But all of that work paid off.
On Thursday night, the 13-minute long CMHS entry swept the Friends4Friends Campaign Film Festival that took place at Austintown Fitch High School. CMHS competed against six other schools — Austintown Fitch, Bedford, Chaney, Salem, Warrensville Heights and Western Reserve high schools — and emerged with several top honors, including Best Actress and Best Teacher-Turned-Actor. The entry from CMHS — it centers on a teenage couple torn apart by the boyfriend’s drug abuse — also was selected as the best overall film.
Superintendent Matthew Bowen noted that all of the films showcased at the festival were very well executed, and that the message they convey “is more meaningful to [students’] peers than if presented by a teacher or outside facilitator.”
“It’s incredibly exciting to see our very own students making a difference in our community and beyond,” he added.
O’Neal, adviser to CMHS’ Operation Keepsake program, attributes the short film’s success to the peer leaders, who came up with all of the ideas and wrote the scripts — she simply facilitated the process, though her students did force her to act.
This year’s videos are available to view on Operation Keepsake’s YouTube channel. As of Friday, the CMHS entry, posted Sept. 15, has almost 1,000 views and more than 700 “likes.”
Those “likes” — which count as votes in the campaign — couldn’t have happened without the help of the Campbell community, O’Neal said. She noted that the group learned from last year’s mistakes and “went all out” this year. Everyone — from CMHS alumni to the school district’s retired teachers — got involved.
“It was a complete effort from the staff, the community and the student body,” O’Neal explained. “It’s typical [of the] Campbell community. No one forgets where they came from, and everyone’s willing to help our students.”
Karen Hinkson, one such student, said though she initially saw involvement in the Friends4Friends Campaign as an opportunity to act, it quickly became so much more. She encourages others to become involved, as well, and is hopeful that this year’s film will show her peers that “doing drugs really isn’t cool.”
“It ruins lives,” said Hinkson, who graduated from CMHS in June and is now studying respiratory care at Youngstown State University. “You don’t have to OD. You don’t have to die. You can talk to someone.”