So sorry to have missed a day. I’m slammed getting ready for the press conference on Sen. Arent’s Anti-bullying resolution on Friday. I’m trying to harvest all the e-mail addresses from the 350 people that signed the petition at www.mybully.org (and where you can sign too) to invite them to come.

I hope you will too. This won’t be easy. There seems to be a paucity of will on the hill these days to address real issues that impact kids and education. Our baby step resolution, which speaks to the number one best easiest way to raise academic achievement in Utah, has taken a back seat to Sen. Buttars crucial save-the-world-bills.

So anyway, this article was due this morning for Family Voice Magazine, so I thought I would post it and give everyone a break from the political stuff.

Btw: We filmed Ed Firmage for two hours last night speaking on a variety of issues, and hope to bring you parts of that soon. He is such a pleasure to listen to. ________________________________________

A Safe School Equals a Great School
The Secret to Improving Academic Achievement – End Bullying
By Clifford Lyon, Human Rights Education Center of Utah
February 1, 2006

By kindergarten, some children believe they have the right to control the social experience of other children.
Vivian Gussin Paley

Imagine your first day in kindergarten. You come from a picture perfect loving home. You know how to be nice to your siblings, how to share, to be gentle and love your family cat. Your mother walks you up to the classroom door, gives you a kiss and sends you into the room. You are nervous but excited because your father has told you that you will love school. Your new teacher greets you with a pleasant smile and points out your chair at a table next to Johnny. As you pull out the chair to sit down, Johnny screams, “No, you can’t sit here, I hate you!” and starts swinging his arms in the air to keep you away.

For a child from a good home, school will be provide their first experience of real trauma. It comes in the form of another child attempting to control the situation around him through the use of physical, verbal, or emotional violence.

If allowed to persist more than once, the culture is set. The victims and the witnesses are at the mercy of the class bully - and so begins the natural process of adaptation for which few children are prepared.

Some kids will join in and also become bullies (usually harassing the same victim), some will fight back, most will shrink into the background and internalize.

Many teachers will reprimand the bully only at the point where the harassment disrupts the class. So the bully learns to harass discreetly. At some point the victim, armed with a sense of justice learned at home, may lash out in frustration, which usually results in their being reprimanded. Suddenly, the sense of fairness learned at home is broken and the child internalizes their first experiences of adult hypocrisy. The ideal of school being a wonderful place to learn and play and feel safe is shattered.

The other children see this. They know it’s not fair, and the learning environment is corrupted.

Recent and ongoing studies reveal that the effects of bullying on our community are wide-ranging, and dramatic. “While bullying has traditionally been seen as merely a rite of passage, it is a serious threat that can have long-lasting detrimental effects on the victims, the bullies, and even the bystanders.”

There is increasing evidence surrounding current research that any amount of bullying improperly addressed and allowed to persist, can contaminate the entire class atmosphere.

The pressure on schools today to improve academic achievement is focused on math, reading, and better teachers. The better solution may well be much simpler.

Stuart Twemlow, a researcher on Menninger’s Peaceful Schools Project, said that forcing principals to make this kind of choice (more reading and math) “oversimplifies” the learning process. “It presumes that if you give a student a competent teacher, they will learn,” he said. “The way you improve intellectual performance is to create a peaceful environment…Academic achievement went up, and suspensions plummeted.”

Twenty-three states have passed anti-bullying legislation since 2001, and 9 more have bills pending this year.