My name is Susannah I am a year 12 at Reynella east high school. I found out about Keep Safe Stay Cool when I was in year 11 in 2008. Mrs Martin a former Reynella East high music teacher and Ms Bonner a Health teacher at Reynella East high found out about it and thought that me and a couple of other people in my class would be interested in becoming a peer educator.

The teachers organised for us to sit in on a year 10 Health lesson to see what it was all about, from then on I wanted to be involved. Mrs Martin gave me an application form to fill out and hand back to give to a social worker at Noarlunga Health village. I was very interested in domestic violence and was not very aware of the statistics. In the January holidays we were required to come in for an informal interview with Irene (our course lecturer). Irene is not like a teacher she doesn’t yell and is very easy to get along with, I don’t think I could have thought of anyone better.

Once the interviews were all done we Trained 3 times in the first week and twice in the second week, we started our training early to get it out of the way. Once school started we only had meeting once a week on Thursday nights from 4-8pm. The meetings/training was very relaxing as we were not treated like we were in a class room, get to sit on bean bags and get pizza for dinner. When we started presenting our meeting changed to 4-6pm, we called it debriefing. I believe that I have learnt a lot from this course and am glad that I was able to get involved. I am doing this course as a stage 2 Community studies subject, once I have completed my 120 hours I then get the 2 SACE points. I think that this course have given me a great opportunity to boost my confidence as I found it really hard to public speaking, but now I don’t feel so nervous.