Ashland County Community Foundation joined Ashland City Schools Foundation and Samaritan Hospital Foundation in awarding grant dollars to facilitate an innovative new idea called Project Pavise.

Ashland City Schools offered the project to aid fifth and sixth grade students in being safer when using the internet.

Project Pavise was created following a response from anonymous student surveys collected in November 2023, as students in fourth through twelfth grades heard presentations from National Internet Safety speaker Jesse Weinberger. She reported that higher device time corresponds with higher anxiety and depression.

Among the goals of Project Pavise is empowering children to make good decisions regarding their use of personal mobile devices and parents to keep their children accountable for these decisions.

Thanks to the grant support, students received boxes with stickers, a t-shirt, and a pair of journals for a parent and their child. The journals were designed to facilitate conversation between children and their parents.

Additionally, the students and parents received weekly videos and daily texts that reinforced the journal content. Parents could also reset their kids’ devices and retrain their suggested viewing in YouTube and similar apps.

The fifth grade campaign ran from September through October, with the sixth grade campaign running from October through November in 2024.

The project was named “Project Pavise” because the goal was to provide students with a shield to protect themselves from the dangers of the internet. A pavise was a shield used in the Middle Ages to protect the entire body.

Find out more information at https://projectpavise.org.