St. Mary's schools start prevention effort this year
Friday, Aug. 6, 2010
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photos by REID SILVERMAN Superintendent Michael Martirano makes a presentation Wednesday on a bullying prevention and community awareness initiative at the Dr. James A. Forrest Career and Technology Center.
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Jodee Blanco says she was picked on mercilessly during her middle and high school years. She turned that experience into a book that has aided a national movement to prevent bullying in schools.
Blanco related her personal stories Wednesday to an audience of educators, parents and students at the Dr. James A. Forrest Career and Technology Center in Leonardtown at the kickoff event of a new bullying prevention and community awareness initiative for the upcoming school year.
"I was the kid that nobody wanted to hang out with. I cried myself to sleep," Blanco said. "My adolescence was a living hell."
She candidly recalled incidents of her school years in suburban Chicago: A dissected piglet was thrown at her face. Students threw her down and stuffed snow in her throat. Countless times, she was bullied in the hallway or cafeteria.
At one point during those years, Blanco said she stopped eating and dropped to a dangerously low weight. She also stopped washing her hair and her face, thinking of herself as invisible to her peers and the rest of the world.
She said that these feelings stayed with her into her adulthood, even after becoming a successful celebrity publicist. But after the shooting in 1999 at Columbine High School in Denver, where two students killed 12 other students and a teacher before shooting themselves, Blanco realized she wanted to write about her hard times in school.
"I understand what could have drove those boys to that desperate place in their minds," she said, relating an incident where as a student Blanco's mother discovered a kitchen knife stowed away in her book bag one morning while she was getting ready to go to school.
She said she in no way condones violence, but that stopping bullying can help prevent violent retaliations in schools.
After publication of her memoir, "Please Stop Laughing at Me … One Woman's Inspirational Story," e-mails and letters began pouring in from students around the nation who faced bullying and, in some cases, were contemplating suicide, Blanco said.
She began touring to schools and working on ways to prevent bullying. She has since written a follow-up book, "Please Stop Laughing at Us."
Blanco will speak to all St. Mary's public school employees on a staff development day later this month, and will also make presentations at four of the county's middle schools and an evening parent presentation at 6 p.m. on Sept. 9 at Leonardtown High School.
"It's not just joking around. You are damaging each other for the rest of your lives," Blanco said. "I will never be whole inside because of how my classmates treated me."
For targets of bullying, "the hallways at school are terrifying because that's where everybody lets loose," she said. In class before a teacher arrives, student can torment others when adults aren't looking, she warned.
According to a St. Mary's survey last school year, about 18 percent of middle school students surveyed said they were bullied. Nearly 70 percent say they have witnessed others being bullied.
Bullying most frequently was reported in the hallways of schools, followed by in the cafeteria, gym and classrooms. The survey showed that more than half of students disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statement: "Students respect other students perceived as different."
About half of the students say they intervene when they witness bullying; 80 percent say adults take action to stop bullying.
Often it is not the actual bully who can cause the most pain, Blanco said; it is the other students who sit by and watch it happen and laugh at another's misfortune. She called such people cowards.
"Coward is the worst thing you can be, because your whole life will be regret," she said.
Blanco urged children to reach out to students who don't fit in and offer them kind words, a place to sit or even friendship.
"Bullying isn't just the mean things you do, it's all the nice things you don't do," she said.
Blanco's story ended happily. She said she attended a high school reunion recently and accepted apologies from some of the primary bullies from her school years. She said she also has since married the school's heartthrob, on whom she had a crush throughout most of her school years.
But she remembers the pain. "It doesn't matter why you laugh at somebody. Being laughed at stinks," she said.
School Superintendent Michael Martirano and Michael Wyant, St. Mary's public schools director of safety and security, launched the bullying prevention initiative this school year to address "what's occurring not only in our schools, but our community, our homes, whether it be in person or by the computer," Wyant said.
To students in the room and elsewhere, school board chair Bill Mattingly said, "You're going to have to make some tough choices … reach out to someone and get some advice, get some help, because the bullying issue goes well beyond your high school years."
"The bully never remembers, but the outcasts never forget," Martirano said, quoting from Blanco's book.
Martirano said now more than ever bullying needs to be addressed because it spills out from schools and can reach children even in the relative safety of their own homes through the Internet.
"Young people should never suffer in silence," Martirano said.
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