Girl Beat Up at Kennedy High School

In case you missed yesterday's story on ABC News, 17-year-old Temperance Maupin was beat up at Kennedy High School on Friday night. Someone shot a video of the attack and posted it on a Facebook page for the world to see.

Temperance and her mom want to know how this could happen on school property and what the school is going to do to ensure her safety. Good questions. The school says it's investigating and has punished the girls involved in the fight.

Temperance is not the first Montgomery County student to face an attack at school. Unfortunately, I doubt she'll be the last. After dealing with a much younger version of bullying in 1st grade last year, I was pleased to see the county beginning to address bullying with a form that came home at the beginning of the school year.  
But a policy and a form is only a start. Now, the county needs to act. It needs to find solutions to combat punching first graders and attacking teen agers.

There is a program in Olney that can make some headway. You Have the Power was started in 2004 by Project Change and has been implemented in every school in the Sherwood cluster except for one elementary school. It brings high schoolers into elementary schools to mentor younger children in how to handle bullying. YHTP's executive director Robyn Glass described the program to me several months ago. A group of 3rd through 5th grade elementary school students meet one time per week after school, usually for about an hour and 15 minutes, for 10 to 12 weeks.  They do activities that address what bullying is and the kinds of bullying the kids see in their schools. They talk extensively about the players in a bullying situation: The bully, the victim and the bystander. The older kids teach the younger ones how to become allies. And middle school students who have been through the program become mentors in training. At the end of the program, the high schoolers work with the elementary school kids on projects to take the message of what they've learned schoolwide. Some projects have included videos, murals, classroom discussions, morning announcements, and school spirit week days devoted to putting a lid on bullying.

While there's no data on You Have the Power and no easy way to measure its success, this program is working on making a change for the better, on dealing with a pervasive issue for our children. The program  hasn't been able to expand beyond the Sherwood cluster because of a lack of funding, its leaders told me. However, it is working on developing training kits for other schools.

For more advice on how to handle bullying, the U.S. government has a terrific Web site for kids and parents devoted to ending bulling: Stop Bullying Now.