Students across Newfoundland and Labrador are urged to be kind and to show compassion every day, especially Wednesday, which was Pink Day in Newfoundland and Labrador
Throughout the province, students from Grades K-12 wore pink to bring awareness to bullying and participated in various activities to promote kindness in their schools and communities.
Schools hosted activities that support this practice.
Included in these activities was a presentation at Prince of Wales Collegiate in St. John’s where a sea of pink was on display as part of the Canadian Red Cross Pink Day, an activity that promotes and anti-bullying message. The Red Cross handed out more than 6,600 pink T-shirts to students province-wide.
In addition, Lynelle Cantwell, 20, a former student at Holy Trinity High School in Torbay, shared her experience with the PWC students.
Cantwell was the victim of online bullying three years ago, in December 2015, and has been interviewed on a variety of media platforms, where she has continued to stand up to bullies everywhere.
She made headlines across North America for turning the tables on bullies participating in an anonymous “ugliest girls” poll at her high school.
Since that time, she has toured Canada doing a host of speaking engagements about her experience and promoting an anti-bullying message.
The Canadian Red Cross, Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro, and Nalcor Energy sponsored the event, with this year’s theme being “You Can Be Someone’s Hero.”
Cantwell became a hero to a lot of people when she fired back at the pollster with this message on Facebook: “To the person that made the ‘ugliest girls in grade 12 at hth’ ask.FM straw poll. I’m sorry that your life is so miserable that you have to try to bring others down. To the 12 people that voted for me to bring me to 4th place, I’m sorry for you too. I’m sorry that you don’t get to know me as a person. I know that I’m not the prettiest thing to look at. I know I have a double chin and I fit in XL clothes. I know I don’t have the perfect smile or the perfect face. But I’m sorry for you. Not myself. I’m sorry that you get amusement out of making people feel like shit. I’m sorry that you’ll never get the chance to know the kind of person I am. I may not look OK on the outside. But I’m funny, nice, kind, down to earth, not judgmental, accepting, helpful, and I’m super easy to talk to. That’s the same for every other girl on that list that you all put down. Just because we don’t look perfect on the outside does not mean we are ugly. If that’s your idea of ugly, then I feel sorry for you. Like seriously? Get a life.”
How the day began
Pink Shirt Day began in Canada in 2007 when two students took a stand against homophobic bullying after a Grade 10 student was harassed and threatened for wearing pink.
The victim — a Grade 9 boy at Central Kings Rural High School in Cambridge, N.S. — wore a pink polo shirt on his first day of school. Bullies harassed the student, called him a homosexual for wearing pink and threatened to beat him up, according to witness accounts.
David Shepherd and Travis Price — both in Grade 12 — heard about the bullying and decided to take action.
They bought dozens of pink shirts and distributed them to their male classmates to wear the next day. The word got out online and hundreds of students showed up in pink, some from head-to-toe, to stand together against bullying.
This set the annual activity in motion, and each year the message has grown in an attempt to curtail bullying in society.
