Middle school students learn about bullying

It happens mostly in the locker room after P.E., said Carson Middle School sixth-grader Caden Lehman.

"They say they're going to beat you up after school, jump you," he said. "They want you to do what they say."

And it can seem like there's no recourse.

"People's fear is that if they tell somebody, they'll just get picked on more," explained Jasmine Munn, 13, a seventh-grader at Dayton Intermediate School. "That's why nobody talks about it."

But at middle schools throughout the area " where national statistics indicate about 30 percent of that age group experience some type of bullying " they were talking about it this week.

Dr. Christian Conte, a psychology professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, spoke to Dayton Intermediate School students on Wednesday.

On Friday, motivational youth speaker Cary Trivanovich spoke at assemblies at both Carson and Eagle Valley middle schools, paid for by the Capital City Arts Initiative.

While Trivanovich used pantomime and humor to capture student interest, Conte took a sober approach.

"This is a real serious subject," he said. "It's not a joke. People get really hurt doing it. It gets to the point where people die from it."

He asked students who considered themselves to be bullies to stand. A handful did.

Conte pointed out that many of them did so only with the support of friends standing alongside them.

"When they're alone, no one wants to look at themselves in the mirror and say, 'I'm the kind of person who hurts people,'" Conte said. "If you're doing it, today is a wake up call to stop. No one looks back and is happy about the people they hurt."

He encouraged those being bullied to reach out to a teacher, parent or school counselor and urged other students to step in when another student is being picked on.

However, he focused mainly on the bullies themselves.

"This is the time you're forming your personalities," he said. "What kind of personality do you want to have?"

He told them change was possible.

"You're not just a bully, there's something more to you," he said. "You can change very quickly, but you've got to want it. You have one chance at junior high. You can make in the same old junior high or you can do something different and start to change it."

Trivanovich's message was aimed more toward those being bullied. He started his presentation with pantomime skits that had the students laughing and clapping.

"This guy's good," Anthony Membreno, 11, leaned over and told his friend.

Trivanovich assured them he wasn't a mime.

"I'm just a normal guy who likes to freak people out with pantomimes," he said.

Then he paused from his performance to talk to the students.

"Would you believe when I was in sixth grade I was a strange kid?" he asked, to which several in the crowd responded, "yes."

"No kidding, I was the kid every kid in school would terrorize," he went on. He told them of walking to and from school alone, eating lunch alone, not knowing what it was like to have a friend. Once, a bully followed him home and beat him up in his own yard.

"When kids made fun of me, I let it affect me," he said. "I grew up thinking very little of myself."

Then it all turned around one day when a group of popular kids stopped in the hallway to talk to him.

The "accidental good mood" that put him in made him act a little goofy, he said. The other students said he was so funny he should join drama.

So he did. He was soon cast as the lead in plays and found his home on the stage. That led to involvement in speech and debate and leadership class as well as a passion for music.

As his self-esteem grew, he said, the bullying stopped.

"What happens if you don't care? There's no fuel for their fire," he said. "Build your self-esteem. Force yourself to make friends. Don't be alone."

The best way to make friends, he said, is to be giving. He used the example of the group of kids who reached out to him to motivate the students to reach out to each other.

He said bullies use fear tactics to make them feel like somebody, something all people find important. He encouraged them to seek out alternative means of doing so.

"I never see kids who are engaged and involved in school bullying other kids," he said. "You know why? They have nothing to prove. That's why we get involved in school, because it helps us to be somebody."

The message resonated with 12-year-old Lehman.

"All bullies want is control," he said. "If you don't give them control, they won't bother you."