Articles/Links

Summary Experts are calling for more focus on bullying not only because it is linked to high rates of teen suicide, but also because it is an impediment to education.

Author Nicholas Kristof

Citation NY Times, February 29, 2012

Link http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/01/opinion/kristof-born-to-not-get-bullied.html

When she was in high school, Lady Gaga says, she was thrown into a trash can.

The culprits were boys down the block, she told me in an interview on Wednesday in which she spoke — a bit reluctantly — about the repeated cruelty of peers during her teenage years.

“I was called really horrible, profane names very loudly in front of huge crowds of people, and my schoolwork suffered at one point,” she said. “I didn’t want to go to class. And I was a straight-A student, so there was a certain point in my high school years where I just couldn’t even focus on class because I was so embarrassed all the time. I was so ashamed of who I was.”

Searching for ways to ease the trauma of adolescence for other kids, Lady Gaga came to Harvard University on Wednesday for the formal unveiling of her Born This Way Foundation, meant to empower kids and nurture a more congenial environment in and out of schools.

Summary With recent stories of anti-gay bullying and tragic suicides of gay youth at the forefront of the national conversation, experts say they are increasingly seeing evidence that middle school is the toughest time for gay youth — a time of intense self-discovery, but also one when bullying and intolerance is at its peak.

Author Jocelyn Noveck

Citation Associated Press; MSNBC

Link http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39639709/ns/us_news-life/

By the time she was in eighth grade, Rory Mann was so aware of the differences between her and other students that she couldn’t bear to enter the cafeteria. Instead, she ate lunch alone on the cold, hard bathroom floor, propped against a wall.

Sometimes Mann, who’d known she was gay for about a year but dared not tell anyone, would cut herself on the arms with a razor blade. Her long sleeves hid the evidence of her misery from classmates and family.

“Everyone’s trying to figure out who they are in middle school,” says Mann, now 18 and a high school senior in Newport, R.I., where she is active in a gay students group.

“They turn into vicious people. They are really insecure, and they exploit someone else’s differences so people won’t see who THEY are.”

Summary Researchers and policy makers from Great Britain visited WMS as part of a US study tour to discover what we were doing in the areas of prevention and intervention, specifically anti-bullying.

Author Louise Morpeth

Citation Prevention Action 12 May 2009

School principals in the US have as much autonomy as their counterparts in the UK but their choice of in-class prevention programs is restricted to those proven to work.

In the UK, freedom of choice has given some obscure and dubious inventions a foothold in the curriculum. In the US – and in Washington state – only the 11 that have made the Blueprints for Violence Prevention approved list can qualify.

Among them is The Olweus Bullying Prevention Program, developed by Dan Olweus in Bergen, Norway, 25 years ago in the aftermath of three suicides and a national campaign, and now an international brand. In the US, implementation has touched almost every State since impressive trial results in Philadelphia and South Carolina in the mid-1900s.

So what of the progress of school “systems change” on the ground in Seattle?