More and more John Gray High School students are saying No to Conflict, the name of a brand new campaign inspired from last year’s five fatal shootings in one week.

The campaign, shortened to N2C was being introduced by teacher Glen Hewell to the kids from Tarpon, one of the four ‘academies’ that make up the school, at their morning assembly.

“Can we stop conflict? No. You can’t put 1200 people and 135 teachers in a small place and not expect conflict. We want to reduce conflict in our school after the five killings.  This is what started this, and we want to reduce it,” he told the students.

After introducing the N2C pledge he said that the students could wear the special N2C wristbands for the rest of their school career.

Explaining the campaign, drama teacher Anthony Chipp said, “There’s a theatre group that meets on a Wednesday night in school, and they took on the name N2C and decided to make that part of their mission statement to end conflict on Cayman, a very noble aim.

“They set about creating a Flash Mob, which is a performance that happens right away without much warning, and performed it at Camana Bay in front of the fountain and about 100 people watched it and it was covered by television too, all to try to raise awareness of N2C within the school.

“This idea is of the students standing up and saying, ‘right, let’s make the place better by ending conflict, by stepping in when other people are in conflict. They chose the term conflict because its broad, we’re not just talking about physical violence, we’re talking about conflict between friends, rumours and so on.”

Two of the students Sashanté Lawrence and Amandy Jiménez, both 15, who took part in the drama skit, which featured kids saying no to a school bully, said that they wanted the N2C message to spread across the whole of the Cayman Islands, and from there, all over the world.