School Matters
February 27 2009
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KELLEY SCHREINER has spent her whole life standing up for people with Downs. Funny and feisty, the high school senior with Downs Syndrome leads by example. She has bedroom full of awards from Special Olympics for basketball and track. She works hard at academics and her volunteer work. Recently, at race car driver Jeff Gordon’s charity bowling event for Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis, Kelley autographed her own photo for auction. It drew $2500 dollars for Riley, and her moxie impressed the race car driver, who gave her a big hug.
Kelley pushes herself hard because she knows the flip side of Downs – the pain that comes with public ignorance about it. When students began taunting her in the halls of her public high school, Kelley went to the computer and typed an open letter.
“When I walk down the halls, I hear what everybody says,” she wrote. “When I hear the word ‘retard’ I usually cry or have a bad day at school. Why do we say that word?”
Kelley was bullied in middle school as well.
“A guy hit me with a basketball,” she informed her classmates. “I still remember his name. It was Jeffrey, and he was angry about his parents’ divorce.”
“Is it too much to ask if we can stop?” Kelly wrote. “I really do think that teachers and students should be careful about what they say to others. People need to realize that words hurt. All of us need to remember that words can hit like a fist.”
Kelley addressed her letter to the editor of the high school newspaper. It was printed the week students underwent sensitivity training toward the disabled.
A ‘retard’ lover
Letters like Kelley’s resonate deeply with anti-bullying activist and author Jodee Blanco, 45, who knows the sting both of words and fists.
“It does no good to tell kids who are bullied to walk away and ignore it,” Blanco says. “It may work with adults but with kids it just encourages the bullies to try harder to get a reaction. You have to confront them without getting emotional. ”
Though Blanco was bullied more than 30 years ago, the psychological scars remain.
Blanco wasn’t disabled like Kelley – just different. Jodee’s bullying began in the first grade at a Catholic school when she stood up for a student who was deaf, with a club foot and thick, black-framed glasses. Blanco was called a ‘retard lover’, and was pegged a ‘tattletale’. Soon fellow students began making fun of Jodee’s clothes, hair and everything about her.
Blanco’s 2003 best-selling memoir, Please Stop Laughing at Me: One Woman’s Inspirational Story, details a harrowing pattern of childhood bullying through elementary, middle and high school.
Classmates called Blanco vulgar names and ‘Gods worst mistake’. They threw her shoes thrown down the toilet and put rotten food put in her locker. Bullies threw dirt, rocks and a partially-dissected pig at her. In 8^th grade, she ate lunch in a bathroom stall to avoid sitting alone in the lunchroom. One day, bullies wrestled her to the ground and packed her mouth with snow, choking her.
Ancient children
Blanco fit the typical profile of a bullied student – what she calls ‘The Ancient Child, TM’ – a child with an evolved sense of compassion and empathy.
“It makes them different. They are like old souls trapped in a young body,” Blanco says. “They’re like little adults, and it makes some other kids feel uncomfortable – and out-of-control.”
Initially, like many bullied children, Blanco blamed herself. She lost a dangerous amount of weight. She faked illnesses to avoid school and prayed each night she’d get cancer. She attempted to slit her wrists. At first, she was afraid to confront the bullies.
When Jodee was in high school, her humiliation turned to rage. She packed a knife in her book-bag, intent on hurting the students who had bullied her. Her mother discovered the knife before school started and sought professional help for Jodee.
The bullying ended when she graduated high school. Blanco left for college and built a successful career as a Hollywood publicist. But the bullying was never far from her mind. The Columbine High School shootings in Colorado prompted Jodee to write the memoir of her bullying experiences in 1993.
Please Stop Laughing at US
The book, Please Stop Laughing at Me, went straight to the best-seller list and Jodee Blanco was inundated with emails from children with similar experiences.
Following the success of the book, she changed her career direction and became an anti-bullying activist, releasing a sequel, Please Stop Laughing at Us, in March of 2008. She now travels the country speaking to packed auditoriums of children and administrators, offering compassion, tough talk, and tips.
Studies on the prevalence of bullying vary widely and results are difficult to quantify due to its subjective nature. A study by the Stanford University School of Medicine indicates 9 in every 10 elementary students face bullying and 6 in 10 take part in it. It happens in all cultures, and often extends beyond elementary and middle school.
Project IRISH
Bullying was never a problem for Liz Faurote until she got to high school. Jodee Blanco’s books caught the eye of the 18-year old Indianapolis Cathedral High School student last summer and they hit a nerve. She bought both of them and read them in a matter of days, following up with an email to Blanco.
Liz’s troubles began as a high school freshman, when some former girls from her elementary school began spreading rumours she was promiscuous.
“They would be civil to my face and talk trash behind my back,” Liz says.” There was no truth to the rumours, but suddenly I started getting text messages and phone calls.”
As word spread to the boys, the cyber-bullying changed to a physical form in the halls of school.
“There was a junior boy, much bigger than I, who started grabbing me, slinging his arm around my neck and dragging me,” Liz says.
At first, Liz did not know how to defend herself.
“I was hurt and humiliated. Some of these girls were on the wild side and I knew they were spreading these rumours about me to take the focus off of themselves. I thought I could handle it on my own at first and didn’t want to tell my parents because I didn’t want them to over-react. But they knew something was wrong because I quit going out.”
Liz’s mounting crisis reached a turning point when the menacing boy cornered Liz in a stairwell and grabbed her arm so tight he wrenched it out of its socket. Liz, who had taken her concerns to a teacher, spoke up. A disciplinary committee expelled the boy for bullying, and other infractions. Liz knew she faced being branded a ‘tattletale’, but by then she no longer cared.
Liz turned her anger to action. Working with her high school on-campus minister and a therapist, she helped form an anti-bullying group called Project IRISH – an acronym for ‘Instilling Respect: Involved to Stop Harassment’. What began with 8 students at her high school has now nearly tripled in size.
The empathy muscle
In January, Project IRISH sponsored a visit by Jodie Blanco to Liz’s school for an assembly with students, parents, teachers, and the public.
Blanco has trademarked several names for various kinds of bullying, from outright violence to Aggressive Exclusion to what she calls Arbitrary Exclusion, where a friend inexplicably turns on someone and persuades everyone else in the group to do the same.
Blanco discovered that naming the forms of bullying brings a form of comfort to those who are bullied.
“It’s like going to the doctor with unexplained symptoms an having him or her tell you what I wrong.”
Blanco says the reasons for bullying have not changed much over the years. She says many children are themselves bullied at home and get ‘mad at the world’. They bring their home problems to school in an attempt to gain control over ‘easy targets’ – classmates high in sensitivity or lacking in confidence, who won’t fight back.
“Cruelty is a form of currency,” Blanco says. “It can buy popularity and friends.”
Blanco says text messaging, video on cell phones, and cyberspace – with the advent of YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, – has taken bullying, and the public humiliation, to a whole new level, and requires a strategy for parents.
“I never tell them to ignore it or to ban their kids from technology,” Blanco says.
“Monitor it, but empower your children. If they are being cyber-bullied, have them print out the evidence. Make a file. Then the parents need to march into the principal’s office and it.”
Blanco says increasingly states are creating laws that take away the ‘wiggle room’ for schools to exempt themselves from cyber-bullying that takes place off school grounds.
Blanco says when schools can be held liable, they are more apt to act.
“Information is power,” Blanco says. “Find out about the laws in your state. If the principal won’t listen, go to the superintendent or the school board. If all else fails and you find other parents of bullied children in school, call the education reporters in town and get some press. Then see if things don’t change.”
Liz Faurote’s Cathedral High School involves the former bullies in a closely supervised anti-bullying program, mentoring other students. “Empathy is a muscle that needs to be developed,” Blanco says.
In her open sessions with students, Jodee Blanco challenges every student to greet or perform an act of kindness for someone who seems different or excluded.
After each of Blanco’s sessions, students flood her with hugs, tears, personal stories and emails. Blanco’s seminars are both emotionally-draining and cathartic for Blanco and the audience.
Reconciliation
Twenty years after her high school graduation, Blanco attended a reunion where several of the former bullies sought her out and apologized for their behaviour.
Like Jodee, both Liz Faurote and Kelley Schreiner have turned their pain to advocacy.
Liz says Project: IRISH has helped her feel more comfortable in her skin.
“I know what it is like to be bullied, so I don’t feel embarrassed standing up for others. It is about doing the right thing,” Liz says.
Kelley Schreiner serves on a Special Olympics committee for Project UNIFY – fostering respect, dignity and advocacy in schools and sports for people with intellectual disabilities.
Her letter to the editor was a good start toward that end. Shortly after her letter to the editor was published, a classmate came up to Kelley in Geography class and apologized.
Updated on October 06 2016