Little Rock event denounces bullying
A few hundred people gathered in the grass Saturday at the Clinton Presidential Center as educators, parents and children sang, danced and spoke out against a common ill in schools: bullying.
“Bullying is at its tipping point,” Arkansas Education Association President Brenda Robinson told the crowd at the Build Communities, Not Bullies event.
“We’re going to stand up and stop the bullying for our students,” she said.
Saturday’s event was put on by the National Education Association and the Arkansas Education Association. In addition to bringing awareness to bullying, the event was intended to emphasize ways for all school staff, not just teachers, to be trained and involved in stopping bullying.
Laura Montgomery,
Members of Jacksonville
president of the National Education Association’s National Council for Education Support Professionals and a home-school counselor working with Landmark Elementary School in the Pulaski County Special School District, wrote a grant to support the event.
Montgomery said she wanted to show “Arkansas and the world” that educational support staff — generally nonteachers, such as nurses, aides, secretaries and janitorial workers — can help stop bullying in schools, too.
Montgomery said that many support-staff members are witnesses to bullying but that most schools do not offer training to them about how to handle the problem.
“I think that’s something that needs to happen,” she said.
Jessica Brinkley, a senior policy adviser with the National Education Association, agreed. She said about 40 percent of school employees were considered support staff.
“How can you make a plan with 40 percent of your school left out?” she said.
In central Arkansas, school districts have started anti-bullying initiatives to address the problem, as well as the increasingly prevalent cyberbullying.
Within the past year, the 25,000-student Little Rock School District implemented the Stand Together, Affirm Diversity committee and now tracks bullying incidents separately to measure how common it is in their schools and whether progress is being made, School Board President Greg Adams said. He added that he thought it would be a while before the district could notice progress.
The Pulaski County Special School District tracks bullying on social media, said district spokesman Deborah Roush. She said the district has had to deal with fake Facebook pages and posts calling for certain students to be kicked out of school.
Individual schools have their own plans, Roush said, such as Baker Elementary’s program for intermediate-grade girls to write positive notes about one another or Fuller Middle School’s program with Just Communities of Arkansas to challenge the school’s most influential students to encourage better treatment among their peers.
Other presenters Saturday included those who have been bullied, parents of bullied children and student groups that often included children who have bullied or been bullied. Miss Arkansas Amy Crain and actress Phyllis Yvonne Stickney also spoke at the event.
A bullying victim told her story and said she wondered why people had told her and her bullied peers to “get over it.”
A parent told the crowd that not all parents know when their children are bullied or when their children are being bullies.
Two Maumelle High School students talked about their Better Safe Than Sorry program to encourage bullied students to speak up about what’s happening to them to their parents and counselors.
Many presenters said they wanted the crowd to know that bullying and bullied students encompass all races, sizes and ages.
“In middle school, I was bullied a lot,” said Randy Olivas, 17. Olivas, a Central High School student, dances with five other students in Los Oficiales Dance Crew, a group that performs at advocacy and awareness events.
Olivas performs with Caleb Lewis, 16, who said he used to be a bully.
“I realized it wasn’t the right thing to do,” Lewis said, adding that he stopped after discovering his younger brother was being bullied.
“I saw how that hurt him, and I realized I was doing that to other people,” he said.
Olivas said he survived bullying because he learned to feel good about himself despite how he was treated.
Steven Juain Young, one of the event organizers and now an attendance secretary for Booker Arts Magnet Elementary School, had a similar story. He said he turned into an activist hoping to stop bullying before it starts.
He was inspired by the adage, “It takes a village to raise a child,” so he named the event “Build Communities, Not Bullies.”
“I hope the kids out there can come out and realize how beautiful a community can be,” he said.