Hello to all the wonderful people in Anchorage and points nearby. Thanks again to Dennis Maloney and the folks in his law office for organizing the follow-up to last year's conference and for showing me a nice time in Alaska.

Please feel free to call or e-mail about anything we talked about at BBB. I very much like the idea of making BBB a permanent group led by parents that advocate for school change in Alaska. On the flight home, I brainstormed some possible objectives and directions that such an advocacy organization could take--though these ideas, I must admit, are very preliminary.

Goal 1. To advocate for and organize a parental/community voice in local school violence prevention initiatives. Generally, to improve two-way communication between parent/violence prevention advocates and local education agencies;

Goal 2. To serve as a clearinghouse for violence prevention information, including curriculum guides and current research;

Goal 3. To publish a newsletter outlining violence prevention programs in the state of Alaska; to participate in other infrmation dissemination activities (conferences/training sessions and the like);

Goal 4. To offer assistance/input into legislative change and anti-bullying initiatives staewide and regionally; to advocate for such laws;

Goal 5. To serve as a clearinghouse for the concerns of parents regarding safety issues in the schools;

Goal 6. To raise funds to support the above activities;

Goal 7. To recognize, through an award, a person each year who has contributed to bullying and violence prevention in the state of Alaska or nationally;

I could see real benefits to the children of Alaska if a parent-professional violence prevention partnership became active in the state around safety, community-wide violence prevention, and anti-bullying efforts. Please feel free to borrow any of these ideas or to flush them and start afresh.

In the meantime, kudos to Mr. Maloney and his activities on behalf of the saftey of children in Alaska. Let's help this effort continue to bear fruit.

I promised that I would keep this site updated and--well--I have not done too well. I have a few things to report today, on the bullying front.

1. The National Center for Educational Statistics has released an excellent national report on bullying that contains considerable useful information. The link is as follows:

http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2005310

In the near future, I will attempt to comment on this report in some depth after I have had a chance to digest it.

2. My son Ray is working in Dennis Maloney's law office in Anchorage. Dennis is the founder of Bye-Bye Bullies, an organization dedicated to school violence prevention. Mrs. Maloney and Hoover have organized a one-day follow up to the bullying conference held last year in Anchorage (Violence Prevention Under the Midnight Sun). The conference is to be held on August 16 and six hours of continuing education credits are available. Please find information on this one-day event at the following address:

http://www.bye-byebullies.com/moreinfo.html

Or, you can write me at the following address: jhhoover@stcloudstate.edu

3. I have blogged about this before, but I wanted to toot Michael Quisnell's horn regarding the violence prevention conference to be held in St. Cloud on October 19 and 20th of 2005. Many excellent speakers will appear at the conference. Information can be found at the following address:

http://isd742.org/sshs/conference.html

An overview of the conference and the approach of its organizers is provided below:

Overview

The Upper Midwest Anti-Violence and Bullying prevention conference is a gathering of social scientists, medical professionals, helping professionals, education professionals, and parents with an eye toward addressing the problem of bullying in school as it relates to community-wide violence prevention. (1) The gathering is meant to address the needs and concerns of school officials and parents as they design safe and drug free schools. The symposium is to be designed around serious science--that is, well established issues and programs that work. However, the sessions are also intended to be accessible to all community members in terms of content. (2) The symposium is built around the idea of a sustainable dialogue. That is, the information presented at the conference is intended to change ideas and actions such that conferees can take school- and community-level ideas back to their homes. (3) A final thread that holds the symposium together is the notion of specific daily themes intended to bring coherence to conference content.

Bullying and violence prevention conference in St. Cloud

I am pleased to announce that A bullying and violence prevention conference is to be held in St. Cloud, Minnesota on October 19 and 20 of 2005. Sessions will be dedicated to media violence, preventing classroom bullying, community-wide violence porevention, mental health aspects of violence, and legal issues. Please check the following web addresses for (respectively) a description of the conference and a brochure/application.

http://isd742.org/sshs/speakers.html

http://isd742.org/sshs/pdfs/savethedatesingle1.pdf

I want to thank everyone who participated in organizing this event and I am greatly looking for ward to it.

Bullying Stories

Two of my colleagues at St. Cloud State, Jerry Wellik and Frank Kazemek, do a wonderful job of using stories, story telling, and story writing to help forge cross-generational friendships and to help young people with behavioral issues to express themselves, perhaps, at times, to retell the more troubling, noxious parts of their life narratives.

Influenced by Jerry and Frank, I have long wanted to put together a book of stories about bullying from the pens of young people. One idea that I have been kicking around is to organize an essay contest and to select the most compelling stories and put them together in book form. These stories, in turn, would serve as data. Someone would then write connecting commentary so that the youngsters' stories would serve as a platform for an exploration of bullying. Please feel free to e-mail me about this project if you have an interest. I would especially enjoy hearing from language arts teachers or principals with an interest in bullying prevention.

We may make 100 degrees in southern and central Minnesota, today! I hope everyone has a great day.

Hello to the folks from Fergus Falls

I had the great pleasure this past Friday, June, 17, of presenting an anti-bullying seminar to teachers and administraters from western and northwestern Minnesota (Fergus Falls). The seminar was sponsored by the Lakes Country Service Cooperative and was extremely well organized. I truly enjoyed the opportunity to exchange ideas with these educators. I thank everyone from LCSC for their hospitality.

I promised to provide a few links to curriculum materials and programs, particularly Bully Busters and "Committee for Children" violence and bullying prevention projects.

This is the publisher's site for Bully Busters:

http://www.researchpress.com/product/item/5192/

Here is an entry from NPR's Morning Edition about Bully Busters:

http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/features/2002/oct/bullies/index.html

The Committee for Children's Web site can be found at the following address:

http://www.cfchildren.org/ . They publish both Second Step (http://www.cfchildren.org/ssf/ssf/ssindex/) and Steps to Respect (http://www.cfchildren.org/strf/str/strindex/)

I also mentioned the promising ideas of Rick Phillips of Safe School Ambassadors http://www.safeschoolambassadors.org/); I have written about SSA in previous posts.

Finally, information about Peter Yarrow's excellent music-based material, Don't Laugh at Me, can be found here: http://www.dontlaugh.org/. The umbrella organization is actually called "Operation Respect," and they offer a thoughtful, well-designed site that includes a children's section.

I had the honor of meeting Mr. Yarrow (in 1991) at the Reclaiming Children and Youth conference in South Dakota (http://www.reclaiming.com/). I was impressed by both his music (of course) and the manner in which he communicated through this medium with young people about ending violence, finding hope, and demonstrating respect. However, I was even more taken with the degree to which he had educated himself about bullying and his seriousness about contributing to bullying prevention. Over and above his music talents, I found Mr. Yarrow to be an articulate spokesperson for peaceful schools. He even signed my guitar--way cool!

Welcome to TQE: "You Asked for it" Conference Attendees

I enjoyed presenting to the TQE group yesterday (June 14, 2005) on my bullying work. I hope that some of you will page down to the materials and contacts that are located on this site. I have been updating these entries and will continue to do so.

Yesterday, I meet with Dr. Cynthia Weishapple at Anoka Ramsey Community College in Coon Rapids, Minnesota. Among other things, we talked about the possibility of St. Cloud State offering a bullying course on the ARCC campus. I hope to do this on Mondays and Wednesdays during SCSU's second summer session (July 18 to August 18, 1:00-3:45) and to allow students to register for either SPED 690 or CEEP 690.

All the details have not yet been worked out, but I welcome anyone to e-mail me if they are interested in this (these) courses (jhhoover@stcloudstate.edu). Please provide your name, telephone number, and e-mail address. If you e-mail me, it would help if you placed the term bullying course in the subject line. I would be more than happy to e-mail a proposed syllabus to you.

Among other topics, I hope to address the following:

* Bullying and systems theory/ ecological views of psychology

* Bullying and trust in adult relationships

* Student views of bullying

* Causes and results of school violence

* Bullying behaviors, including relational aggression

* Bullying prevention: Second Step, Bully Busters, Safe School Ambassadors

I am willing to consider distance learners, but have not addressed as yet how I can work this out.