Mr. Barry had the opportunity to attend and be a panelist at this past week's Governor's Bullying Prevention Summit here in Des Moines. It was a great event with a sold out crowd of 1200, nearly half of them students wanting to make a difference. Mr. Barry representing school counselors of Iowa on the Cyberbullying panel. All of the panels and keynote presentations were recorded and broadcast live online. They will soon be posted so anyone can view them at anytime. When this happens, I will post the links so you can see the great information that I got to see when I was there.
Biggest thing I learned from the conference was that the problem of bullying is a large and complex problem that will take efforts from everyone to solve it. Not just teachers, but students, parents, community members, everyone. And most of the experts who spoke and even the student experts who spoke, agreed that the group that can have the biggest effect are the students. Solutions to bullying created by and led by the students have the best chance to solve the problem of bullying. In fact, many students from schools all over the state produced videos showing their ideas and these ideas were some of the best ideas I have seen in my years as a counselor. Seeing these student videos and seeing all of the students in attendance at the Summit gives me great hope that we will finally turn the tide with bullying and begin to solve the issue and make all of our schools safe again.
