Tuesday October 9, 2007

Charlottesville City Schools are looking to make the schoolyard bully a thing of the past.

Bullying is a problem that's on the rise in Charlottesville schools, yet it's as old as the schools themselves.

"It manifests itself in the school to a degree, particularly with younger kids and then that sort of builds as they get older," says Rory Carpenter with Charlottesville/Albemarle Commission on Children & Families. "It develops a kind of tone of violence that runs through the rest of their school years."

Enter Lee Davis, a teacher at Charlottesville High who has devoted many hours to putting a stop to bullying.

"What we're trying to do is to get students to really say 'this is not something we want in our schools and this is not something we're gonna do,'" she says, explaining how the program could work.

Davis wrote out a grant that would help educate students and teachers about how to deal with bullies, and more importantly, how to prevent them in the future.

City Council earmarked funds for the grant this summer and the school system just accepted more than $30,000 to solve what's become a complex problem.

"We are finding that more and more, particularly at the middle school level and higher, that there is a lot of cyber-bullying going on so that students are text-messaging each other right in front of teacher," Davis says.

The school system's adopted a program that will seek to educate students, teachers and parents about bullies. If it's successful, Carpenter says there could be significant ramifications:

"Perhaps we'd see a reduction in kids getting involved in gang activity, in violent activities. That would be our goal: to keep kids out of the juvenile justice system."