MURRAY — Mitch Rasmussen's biggest fear was being shoved in a locker.

As a new seventh-grader at Riverview Junior High School, Rasmussen had heard the old-as-time hazing tall tales about what happens to new seventh-graders their first day of junior high — everything from pushing a penny down the hallway with your nose to being stuffed in your locker by burly ninth-graders.

But the first day of his junior high career Friday turned out to be relatively easy.

Riverview principal Debbie Sorensen planned it that way. Her school is part of a program that allows new seventh-grade students to come to school a day before eighth- and ninth-graders to get acquainted with the school and their new classmates.

The seventh-graders learn how to work their lockers, how to get from one end of the building to the other and how the cafeteria works in a pressure- and upper-classmen-free environment.

"It is so successful," said Sorensen. "We are extremely pleased."

She said parents routinely tell her how wonderfully the program works and how relieved students are to not have the added pressures.

Fear of the unknown, having seven teachers instead of one and ceasing to walk everywhere in single file lines add to the scholastic pressures. Throw in puberty and new social pressures, and the pressure that comes with the first day of class can be overwhelming.

Delight Page, a teacher and team leader at the school, said new junior high students need the added attention and help to assimilate into the new environment.

"It makes them comfortable," she said. Almost overnight they have to learn to act more responsibly, stop being children and start being teenagers, she said.

Abby Eastia said being able to have her first day of school without eighth- and ninth-graders was great. She said she learned how to use the cafeteria and thinks she knows how to get to all her classes.

Eastia said her biggest fear was getting lost the first day of school. "Now, I know what to do," she said.

Studies on the transition from elementary to middle school note the decline in students' self-image after moving to junior high and a school's need to aid students' transition in order to encourage emotional and scholastic success.

Page said many things can be done to help a student make the transition. She grew up in California and didn't have a transition day when she moved up into junior high.

She said having that day helps the new students to be confident and comfortable with junior high, peers and classes. She said the early teenage years are tough. The students need all the help teachers can give.

"It works," said Sorensen. She said earlier that morning while walking down the hall she saw a girl in tears because she couldn't get her locker open. Sorensen stopped and showed the girl just how to work her padlock and open her locker.

Sorensen said almost immediately the tears dried up and the girl shot off to class happy and relieved.

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At the end of the day, all the seventh-graders participated in a scavenger hunt to see if they knew their way around the school. They had to find things in the gym, library, cafeteria and even the janitor's office.

Come Monday, the first day of class for the eighth- and ninth-graders, the new seventh-graders will have the day off. That way, when they start school again on Tuesday, everyone has completed the same number of school days.

"It's going good," said student Isaac Pottenger. He was mostly unhappy about his mom signing him up for an advanced math class. Everything else, he says, had been just fine.


E-mail: rrogers@desnews.com

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