Students Create Stop Bullying Program to Stop Bullying Nationwide by Tina Larson

While parents and educators are urging Congress to take action against the epidemic of bullying, 17 sixth grade students from St. Stanislaus Kostka School in Michigan City, Indiana created a program for schools across the nation to use to end bullying.

Michigan City, IN (PRWEB) November 10, 2009 -- While parents and educators are urging Congress to take action against the epidemic of bullying, 17 sixth grade students from St. Stanislaus Kostka School in Michigan City, Indiana created a program for schools across the nation to use to end bullying.

Working with self-esteem and character development nonprofit, Hey U G L Y - Unique Gifted Lovable You, the program helps students deeply understand the dynamics and many layers of bullying so they can learn to protect themselves, and others, from its effects while learning how to control their own personal bullying behaviors.

Bullying is a critical issue facing students today with approximately 864,000 teens staying home one day a month because they fear for their safety. According to the National Youth Violence Prevention Resource Center, the facts are troubling because bullying too often leads to violence, loss of self-esteem and even depression. Recent headlines support this finding as bullying is being attributed to youth murders and suicides. In fact, the CDC reports only car accidents and homicides (murders) kill more people between the ages of 15 and 24, making suicide the third leading cause of death in teens and overall in youths ages 10 to 19 years old.

Dr. Sue Bryant, Principal at St. Stanislaus originally brought Hey U G L Y in to work with three sixth grade girls who were bullying each other. Instead of zeroing in on the three girls Hey U G L Y secured permission to work with the entire sixth grade to create a Stop Bullying task force. Together they developed the Hey, Stop Bullying Emotional Learning Activity Plan (ELAP) which is now available to schools across America at heyugly.org.

"We delved into why people bully, what kinds of people bullies prey upon and how we can protect ourselves and others from bullies while helping to stop it in our schools," said Hey U G L Y's co-founder and president, Betty Hoeffner. "We had the students participate in self-esteem and diversity-building activities to help them uncover their bullying tendencies and understand the negative impact those have on others and their own psyches. The task force then took their learning and went into all of the classrooms in their school to teach their fellow students what they had learned."

"Every school has a bullying problem whether they are aware of it or not and whether they are acting on it or not," said Carrie Miller, sixth grade teacher at St. Stanislaus. "The Hey U G L Y program is a way to really get students to take ownership of their behaviors, to recognize their behaviors. I think the program also really encourages other students to step in if they see something happening that shouldn't be. I think that the Emotional Learning Activity Plan is well written. The activities are interesting to the kids. They enjoyed the activities but they learned while they were doing it."

"Some bully because they think it will make them feel good, but it doesn't." explained task force member, Madeleine Wojasinski. "It makes them feel worse. The bully makes someone else feel bad and then that person bullies someone else. It's like a chain. One bully creates another bully."

The task force and Hey U G L Y are looking forward to ending that chain by having every student in America experience the Hey Stop Bullying ELAP so they can become members of the national task force to end bullying.

Hey U G L Y is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering teens and tweens with character development and self-esteem-building programs to help them counter bullying, eating disorders, violence, substance abuse and suicide. (UGLY is an acronym for Unique Gifted Lovable You.) The Hey U G L Y message has reached over 650,000 students through their work with schools, community organizations and youth development professionals. Their website, radio show, emotional learning activity plans, in-school presentations and teen/tween task force programs enable students to become an integral part in the teaching and learning process. Since the number one influencer of teens and tweens is their peers, Hey U G L Y designs all of their programs to empower the students to be a part of the solution. Go to www.heyugly.org to learn more.

This article was written by Tina Larson, a freelance writer who focuses on articles regarding education and community development. This University of Iowa student, with a double majoring in journalism and communication studies, is firm director of the UI Public Relations Student Society of America and co-president of the UI Society of Professional Journalists.

###