Pink Shirt Day – celebrated in local schools last Wednesday – began in a hallway inside Central Kings Rural High School in Cambridge, Nova Scotia in 2007, but the impetus for the anti-bullying movement began many years earlier.
Throughout his elementary and high school life, Travis Price was bullied for being different.
“I was a bit of an outsider. I had my own style, my family didn’t have a lot of money,” said Price. “Once it started (the bullying) and I didn’t defend myself or go ask for help, it just continued.”
On Friday morning, Price, the co-founder of Pink Shirt Day, visited Tamanawis Secondary in Surrey to talk about his experiences and how students could make a difference and help stop bullying in their school and their community.
For Price, the harassment he endured as a youth was relentless. Despite attempts at making friends in school and trying to fit in, the verbal, mental and physical abuse got worse.
He was a small-statured child, and with only a few friends, Price kept to himself, just looking to avoid any possible confrontations.
He immersed himself in video games and sports, but it was a song by Rob Thomas that helped him begin to see there was hope. The lyrics of the song, Little Wonders, spoke of letting go, letting your troubles roll off your shoulders and that life was going to get better.
“I really felt that that song was talking to me,” he said. “I listened to that song over and over again until I honestly felt that I would get by.”
That’s when he knew he needed to ask for help and that the way he was being treated wasn’t his fault. However once he reached high school, the harassment resumed.
On the first day of Grade 12, Price and his best friend David Shepherd were in the school hallway discussing their upcoming grad year when they noticed a young boy in Grade 9 coming through the front doors of the school on his first day of high school. He was wearing a pink shirt.
Almost immediately he became the target of the school bullies, who ridiculed him for this choice of clothes, but the school bell rang and not one student came to his defense.
Price saw the look of despair on the young boy’s face, but being unsure what to do, Price and Shepherd went to class and said nothing.
By lunch time, the boy’s parents had come to the school to take him home following a physical threat.
That’s when Price and Shepherd decided to support the boy by going to town and buying every item of pink clothing they could find and encourage students to wear pink in support of the bullied boy. Because Cambridge was a small town, the only shirts they could find were 75 pink girls’ tank tops, so they grabbed some wristbands and headbands as well.
That night, the pair posted their idea on Facebook and the next day at school, they started handing out pink shirts and wristbands to every student who showed up.
As the school buses began to arrive that morning, students were getting off the buses dressed in pink.
By the time the last bus arrived, 800 of the school’s 1,000 students were wearing pink and the Pink Shirt Day anti-bullying movement was born.
Within a month, the idea had spread across Canada and around the world.
“That day, we changed the culture at our school,” Price said.
For Tamanawis Grade 10 student Gian Soquena, the message struck a personal chord.
“I think everything he said was so inspirational. I’ve been bullied and it’s so true… No one should be bullied,” said Soquena. “I would like to think now that I would stand up and say something.”
For Grade 10 classmate Arry Pandher, the story hit home as well.
“I’ve been bullied and I’ve seen my friends bullied. Sometimes you think that just saying stop won’t do anything, but you’ll never know until you try,” he said.
For so long, Price had believed he was alone, but that day he realized that the vast majority of the students at his Nova Scotia school had experienced some sort of bullying.
“I was the type of kid that always tried to find the positive side of things,” he said. “As much as I was uneducated about how to get help, I think these kids were uneducated about how much they were actually hurting me. Bullying is a behaviour that can change and people always say to me, ‘you must really hate those bullies,’ but I don’t. Since the beginning, Pink Shirt Day has allowed me to be a voice for those kids who didn’t think they had one.”