FROM THE FAMILY THERAPY NETWORKER
September, 2000
Reprinted here with permission of the author.

"In this issue's cover story. Senior Editor Mary Sykes Wylie takes us on a journey into what is for most adults terra incognita, the day-to-day life of an ordinary school in Sidney, Maine, that decided to take on a extraordinary challenge: transform the way its students treated one another. In an educational world suffused with pop psychology& and rife with philosophical pendulum swings, Wylie's unforgettable portrait of the Bean school underscores how the emphasis on childhood self-esteem as a goal in itself and the dread many adults feel about taking charge of children can be the most formidable obstacles to improving the emotional climate of our schools. Her story is required reading for anyone interested in the grit and moral stamina it takes to make a difference in schools today."

TEACHING KIDS TO CARE
By Mary Sykes Wylie

Family Therapy Networker article 9/00

It is early morning at the James H. Bean School in Sidney, Maine--350 children, k through 6-and the playground is a near-riot of raw kinetic energy. At 7:30 am, a half hour before classes begin, kids are spilling from buses and cars, festooning swings and seesaws and jungle gym in the playground, running, jumping, shrieking, laughing, combining themselves into tight little clots of two, or three or four, then, like random atoms, flying apart to regroup in new formations.

Inside, Stan Davis, the school's guidance counselor-a tall, bearded man, still looking a little like the 60s civil-rights activist he once was-takes a morning walk along the halls of his domain. "Hey, Daniel, I like your sweatshirt-wanna switch?" he calls out to one small, dark-haired boy making a beeline down the hall to the door. "No way!" the boy cheerfully barks back, without breaking stride. Another boy, robust and grinning, comes up, he and Davis give each other high-fives, but in an excess of enthusiasm, the boy throws back a hard, rough slap. "Hey, hey, let's try that again, only this time a little more gently," says Davis easily. With a good-humored show of exaggerated politesse, the boy gives a delicate touch of the palm to Davis's outstretched hand, then marches off with a certain bravado. A thin girl, perhaps ten, wearing glasses and a worried look on her little, pinched face, approaches. "I need to talk to you," she says in a low, intense voice. Davis makes a note in his palm pilot, nods gravely at her, says softly, "I'll see you at 9:30 recess, Julia." Davis approaches a new boy, who is standing beside--but not exactly with-several other kids. "Hi, Lawrence," Davis says. "Larry!" the boy corrects loudly, insisting upon a less formal nickname than the handle his mother has given him. "Okay, Larry," says Davis, who now has the attention of the other boys. "I was thinking that maybe you would like to choose a couple of other kids and come learn a few magic tricks?" Larry's eyes widen with excitement, but he affects an offhand attitude. "Um, yeah, cool," he says casually, as the other boys now look at him with new interest. "That's a way to give the new guy a little power," says Davis after the boys wander off together.

Davis spies a second-grade boy standing in the hall, rythmically bopping a much smaller girl on the head with a book. "Don't do that," the girl whimpers ineffectually, shrinking down against the wall, clearly not knowing how to get him to stop . Davis walks over. "What are you doing?" he asks the boy incredulously. "I'm hitting her on the head with this book," the boy answers matter-of-factly. "Well, is there something wrong with that?" Davis asks, his voice rising an octave or two. The boy stops, thinks for a long moment, then answers, "Uh, yeah. It's her head." Davis nods vigorously. "There is only one head in the whole universe you have a right to hit," he says emphatically. "Whose head is that?" Light bulbs go on in the boy's eyes. "Mine!" he crows triumphantly, as if suddenly figuring out the answer to a devilish riddle. "Good. Remember that," says Davis crisply and continues his odyssey. "The root word for ‘discipline' means to teach," says Davis. "But, sometimes, you'll only have fifteen seconds to get the lesson across, so you'd better be prepared."

There is something deeply familiar and quintessentially reassuring about the long, low, factory-like building that has been staple of American school architecture for half a century or more, the corridor walls crowded with exuberantly colored student artwork and paper cutout constructions, the miniature tables, desks and chairs glimpsed inside classrooms, the smell of school, compounded of books, erasers, art supplies, floor cleaner, vagrant gym and cafeteria emanations. James Bean fairly thrums with cheerful, goal-directed activity, deeply evocative of what adults of a certain age nostalgically imagine their own elementary school was like in 1970, or 1960 or even 1950-a safe and secure haven of childlike innocence and good cheer, where nothing very bad ever did or ever was likely to happen.

Now, in the year 2000, this dreamy vision of school, even of an elementary school as almost palpably nice as Bean, seems hopelessly naive. True, Bean has not experienced anything like the grotesque school incidents that have made the news recently: the six-year-old boy who gunned down a classmate in Michigan; the three first-grade girls who formed a "hate club" and made detailed plans to kill a seven-year-old in their Indiana school; the three nine-year-old boys who allegedly pinned a protesting little girl forcibly to the ground and simulated raping her in a coastal Maine schoolyard. Yet, even a school as generally sunny and peaceable as Bean feels these outlaw perturbations. During the course of a regular weekly meeting between Davis and two playground supervisors, one mentions that a 7-year-old boy, in a fit of anger, has said to another child, "I'll murder you," and wonders uneasily how to take this. Davis points out that the boy has never before demonstrated any of the warning signs for committing real violence-he is not isolated, shows no history of impulsive aggression, nor has he ever made specifically detailed threats of violence, though he may have ready access to guns (in Maine, every child can be assumed to have ready access to guns). Davis promises to talk to the boy, anyway. "I can‘t imagine him actually bringing a gun to school," the supervisor finally says. "No," answers Davis, "but then, we never used to imagine that any child would bring a gun to school and kill anybody."

*

Lethal violence is still virtually non-existent in elementary schools, which remain physically about the safest places for children in America. But while the situation in our public schools is less terrible than many people imagine, it is still bad enough-about three million crimes occur every year in them, ranging from vandalism and theft to assault, rape and murder. Fear of school violence, particularly since the school shooting rampages of the last few years, has generated a flood tide of violence-prevention programs sloshing through American schools-including anger management, emotional learning, character and citizenship education, conflict resolution, assertiveness training, peer mediation-that presumably teach children skills for controlling impulses, avoiding fights, resolving conflicts among themselves and developing more altruistic attitudes toward others.

Anti-violence programs are a a jumbled lot, some focusing on individual troubled children and their families, others directed at everybody in a school. While preliminary studies, rough evaluations and anecdotal reports from individual schools show good results from many anti-violence interventions-fewer fights, more problem-solving skills, better impulse control-large scale empirical evidence of their effectiveness is still lacking. "A lot of things schools are doing look good, sound good and make people feel good, but there is still very little hard evidence that they actually work," says Daniel J. Flannery, director of the Institute for the Study and Prevention of Violence at Kent State University. On the one hand, says Flannery, interventions targetting individual antisocial children-counseling, academic tutoring, anger management--do not improve schools over the long haul because they fail to address the social context in which violence occurs. Many other programs target the entire school body, but focus too narrowly, and for too short a time, on a single curriculum-ten class sessions on mediation skills or character education or emotional self management-which is never integrated into the ongoing daily life of the school and fails to have much impact on the overall social climate. "You can't plop down a single-component program that ignores the multitude of other things happening at school and expect it to work very well," he says.

Another concern is that the very popular conflict resolution and peer mediation programs, which presumably help kids get along better with one another have no real effect on bullying and teasing. Once widely dismissed as an inevitable part of growing up-no worse than chicken pox and skinned knees-- bullying and teasing are now considered more like a kind of juvenile terrorism that encompasses a whole range of anti-social acts, including assault, intimidation, extortion, ridicule and ostracism. There is a growing body of research demonstrating that bullies are substantially more likely to engage in delinquency as adolescents and crime as adults, while victims of bullying are at far greater risk for physical illness, school failure, depression and suicide. And, it is lost on nobody in the educational field that a majority of school shooters had themselves been bullied and carried their desire for revenge to murderous extremes.

What seems to distinguish strong anti-bullying programs from other anti-violence efforts is the recognition that bullying is different from an ordinary fight between more or less equally matched peers; it is an abuse of power, which will end only if adults resolutely step in and stop it. "Bullying is different from other types of conflict, because it really involves a tremendous imbalance of power, like domestic violence or child abuse, which you wouldn't use conflict resolution or peer mediation to resolve," says Clemson University (South Carolina) research psychologist Susan Limber, project director for the first large-scale study in the U.S. of an anti-bullying program based on the pioneering work of Norwegian researcher, Dan Olweus. Olweus's book, Bullying at School, published in 1993, was one of the first books on the subject and remains the most definitive source.

Efforts to halt almost any aggressive or assaultive behavior are likely to fail if they are not backed up by adults who are ready and able to exert their own authority, argues psychologist and national school consultant Michael Valentine, author of How to Deal with Discipline Problems in the Schools. Children are often exhorted, in the language of conflict resolution and peer counseling, to take charge of monitoring themselves and "make choices" that will solve problems of aggression, without much adult backup, says Valentine. He has heard teachers advise students who are hit or kicked by a schoolmate he or she should "tell the person how it makes you feel when he hits you," or ask the whole class to "talk to" the offending student, but refuse to intervene themselves. "I have seen kids breaking up fights between classmates while a teacher stands by, doing nothing," reports Valentine. In Valentine's view, many adults, including teachers, have been cowed by psychological fads into abdicating their responsibility as adults into letting children make decisions that are beyond their developmental capacity to make. "Instead of teaching kids conflict management, why don't adults step in and stop the fighting in the first place?"

Olweus's method rests fundamentally on adult willingness to intervene actively and unequivocally when they see kids being bullied and to teach children the skills they need to protect each other from bullies. In his view, a campaign against bullying must be a community affair that involves everybody-teachers, students, staff, parents-in a comprehensive, whole-school, all-out blitzkrieg against it. And, unlike most other violence-prevention programs, the Olweus bullying-prevention model is supported by solid empirical evidence drawn from two decades of research in Scandinavia; since its publication, further research on the model in Great Britain, Japan and Canada show that it does reduce bullying by 50 percent or more. In the South Carolina study of the method, involving 6,500 children, Limber reports initial success similar to outcomes in other countries

*

About two years ago, Davis began instituting the Olweus model at the Bean School as part of a comprehensive whole-school system of discipline and social skills training. All students at the school take a 12-week anti-bullying course, and on a typical morning, Davis loads up on magic props (he is a trained magician) and heads off to a third grade class for a weekly morning session teaching kids how to foil bullies, protect each other and befriend victims. On the way to the classroom, Davis passes large signs hung along the hallway as well as on the walls of every classroom quoting Martin Luther King, "In the end, we will not remember the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends," and below a three-part "plan" the kids are exhorted to follow in dealing with bullies: "Tell the bully to stop. Tell a teacher. Reach out in friendship." In his classes this year, Davis is having the children read, enact and write about The Hundred Dresses, an anti-bullying classic written in 1944 by Eleanor Estes. The book tells the story of Wanda, a poor immigrant child-odd, badly dressed, mostly silent, not a particularly attractive little figure-who is bullied by the rich and popular Peggy and her hangers-on. But the central character of the story is Maddie, Peggy's best friend, who does not join the bullying, but doesn't protest it either. Maddie is the quintessential ambivalent bystander, says Davis, straddling the line between conscience and fear, between the desire to help the victim and the dread of becoming a target herself. Kids who see their classmates beaten or humiliated by their peers also feel alone and afraid, unaware that they are actually part of a large, potentially powerful crowd of non-bullies-an estimated 80 to 90 percent of the child population.

Today, Davis asks for volunteers to get up before the class and play the major roles-the victimized Wanda, the bullying Peggy, the fearful and conscience-striken Maddie. Every hand shoots up, the kids who are chosen for this round (all get a chance to play) eagerly run up to the front of the class. After acting out the story, the children reenact actual teasing or bullying situations they have encountered and practice new ways of responding. In one story, a "bully" snatches a ball away from a victim but the "bystanders" seem uncertain of what to do next. "What is your plan? You have to have a plan," Davis prompts. "Remember, it might not be safe to confront the bully alone," he reminds them, "you want to go with friends because there is strength in . . . what?" "Numbers!" the kids shout, and they march in phalanx up to tell the bully to cut it out. If the bully still doesn't back down, what should they do? "Go get a teacher," several call out. At the end of the improvised scene, several "onlookers" crowd around the "victim," telling him he can play with them, if he wants-part of a "plan" to stop bullying is to befriend the outcast. "What do you get when you help somebody?" Davis drives the lesson home. "A new friend!" they roar.

To an adult outsider, these phrases, like the three-part exhortation in the hall ("Tell the bully to stop, tell a friend, reach out in friendship"), can seem simplistic and pat-are the kids really understanding and getting this stuff? Does it translate into actual behavior in the real world? Davis answers that the core of a practical education is literally "practice, practice, practice," that kids have to experience saying the words, acting out the skits over and over before they integrate the lessons into the way they think and feel. The phrases chanted at the tops of their lungs are instant, simple, emotionally engaging reminders-like string tied around a finger-of what they can do to help themselves and their friends out of tight spots.

After the skits, Davis performs a little magic show, and the tricks-with cards, pieces of string, empty containers and scarves-both entertain and enlighten, reinforcing the lessons about bullying they have just learned. All of the tricks make a point-- that some very popular and attractive kids can be real stinkers inside (here he pulls from a hollow bright red can a large scarf with the picture of a big skunk), or that other kids, who don't seem so cool at first sight can make wonderful friends if you stick around and get to know what they are like inside (he reaches into a plain empty brown bag and pulls out quantities of brilliant flowers and colored scarves). It is corny and charming and the kids watch intently, spellbound. Davis has a magic club and teaches tricks like these to students, particularly those who have trouble making friends or are susceptible to bullying; with magic, they can literally "amaze" their peers, and acquire some positive power. Magic "helps kids see that anything is possible," says Davis. In class, the magic tricks seem to imbue the anti-bullying lessons with the power of the magician to enchant the foe, bring down the tyrant.

#

Davis became the architect of the school's anti-bullying program when he joined the Bean School two years ago. He began his new career as an elementary and high school guidance counselor around 1985, and worked nine years as the behavior specialist for the entire school district , Maine SAD #47. Before that he had been a social worker and family and child therapist for 20 years. Unsure of the long-term impact of his therapy, he was drawn into school counseling because he had become convinced that, for kids, an ounce of prevention was worth a ton of cure. "In education, you get to help shape children's lives over the long run. Instead of spending only a few months with someone-not really knowing how they turn out--you get to follow a 'case' for up to seven years!" Since becoming a guidance counselor, he has presented suicide and substance abuse prevention programs in different schools around the country. And, somewhere along the way, he took up the study of magic, partly because magic enchants, delights and entices even defensive and distrustful people into a receptive state of mind.

In retrospect, it almost seems foreordained that Davis would become an expert in bullying prevention. As an unathletic and intellectually minded child in a school that celebrated sports he was bullied for years--ridiculed, called names, hit, punched, knocked down, kicked-by gangs of jocks. Davis still remembers that time with pain. "If you are being bullied, you are in the position of an experimental animal getting repeatedly and randomly shocked by a jolt of electricity; you can do nothing to escape it-you'll get zapped no matter what you do, so you give in." Even decades later as an adult therapist, he still felt stymied by the problem, no better able to help his young clients who were bullied than he had been able to help himself as a child. In 1993, while still district behavior specialist, he was asked by the principal of another school in the SAD 47 district to work with a boy being harassed and beat up by schoolmates. "Like any other therapist, I had been taught to do the standard things-try to help individual victims deal with their feelings of grief and loss, learn to cope better by ignoring the bully, recover a sense of self-esteem and personal efficacy-all so the bullying wouldn't bother them so much. But, that kind of intervention was almost always a waste of time. It didn't help this kid, either."

Davis cast around for different, more effective approaches to bullying. He drew upon his experience of the Civil Rights movement and began thinking of bullying as a fundamental violation of human rights-and as much a social as a personal problem. He also discovered the work of Dan Olweus, whose research indicated that bullies generally do not suffer from low self esteem. Indeed, bullying is "ego-syntonic": it gets the bully what he or she wants (feelings of power and dominance, often popularity, as well as concrete rewards, like extorted money, lunch, favors from victims). Nor is there much point in exhorting the victims to fight back. Not only does this shift the responsibility for stopping the abuse to victims, it flies in the face of the well-established observation that bullies-like adult criminals--pick on those whom they perceive to be vulnerable, scared, in a position of weakness and unable to defend themselves. "People often e-mail me asking me how they can get their child to stand up to a bully, get the bully to back down," says Davis. "My answer is, 'There may not be a way without adult help-if your child could do that successfully without help, he wouldn't be a target in the first place.'"

Olweus's research was a revelation to Davis. "It knocked me out. Like most people, I had always assumed that bullying was inherent to the human condition. But reading Olweus was such an illumination. The book showed me that kids don't have to be bullied, it is not a given, inescapable part of childhood, and it isn't solely the bullied child's responsibility to do something about it." Most rivetting to Davis was Olweus's unassailable argument that bullying was not merely an individual predicament, but a social problem, no less than racism or sexism or spousal and child abuse. In short, bullying-done by a small minority of children-would not happen without the fearful and silent acquiescence of other children and the unspoken, unadmitted complicity of adults.

Davis developed a plan, drawn from Olweus's book, for working with the entire school where he was then a consultant. Within about three months, in-school aggression had dramatically decreased, the boy he had been asked to help was no longer being harassed and a peer culture had developed among students that bullying was something that "we just don't do." Since then, Davis has expanded and refined his anti-bullying program and presents it in both day-long training workshops for school personnel and children's shows in many states around the country, awakening both teachers and children to the potential power and responsibility they have to keep the peace.

In 1998, Davis joined the Bean School, which already had a reputation for high standards, effective and sensitive teachers, nice kids and a supportive community. But there were problems at Bean--regular outbreaks of vicious name calling and verbal harassment, daily reports of kids hitting, punching, shoving and pulling each other off play equipment and more serious episodes of physical violence. Occasionally an ambulance had to be called to the school; one child, for example, turned a schoolmate upside down and slammed his head against the asphalt. More than ten children were chronic victims of bullying, regularly singled out for verbal and physical punishment by others. Before Davis arrived, disciplinary measures for bullying were unplanned and unpredictable, received vacillating support from the principal then in charge and aroused the ire of parents who believed their kids were being treated unfairly.

When Davis came to Bean two years ago, he had learned from his first victory against school bullying that changing a school was a systemic project, requiring the concerted effort of everybody. During his first year at Bean, he began working with the assistant principal to develop a more consistent and structured school-wide plan of discipline, which was expanded to include a comprehensive anti-bullying campaign after Principal Pfeiffer and Assistant Principal Reynolds arrived in 1999. Both Pfeiffer and Reynolds were already philosophically committed to the emotional well-being children in school and particularly concerned about bullying. Together, the three instituted a comprehensive discipline and anti-bullying program, training "one hundred percent of the staff," says Pfeiffer, "making sure everybody was on board, right down to the cooks and custodians. I have always thought that to make something like this work, it is very important to have all the adults in a school interacting with students and feeling connected to them-everybody needs to be involved to make sure bullying doesn't happen."

In the year or so that the new program has been in place, serious physical violence has became a rarity at Bean, hitting and punching have declined dramatically and garden-variety schoolyard nastiness has been reduced as well. Kids are not afraid to report being harassed or help schoolmates under attack. Classrooms are calmer, more tranquil and amenable to learning. "The system has absolutely changed the atmosphere of the school, without a doubt" says Reynolds. "There is less anxiety, less disruption in classes. Teachers can spend less time on discipline and more time on the fun part of teaching, which is introducing kids to new concepts and ideas." And the kids really do seem to be getting it. Two brothers, 2^nd and 3^rd graders and new students at Bean, were known for spotty attendance at their old school but had not stayed home once in the several weeks since transferring. Joining them for lunch one day, Davis asked them why it was they were now coming every day. In their old school, they said, kids teased them all the time about their scruffy, hand-me-down clothes and funny haircuts-but not at Bean. "The kids are nicer here," they said simply. "As adults, we have the power to change peer culture," says Davis. "We can break down the cliques, end the assumption that we are not our brother's keeper and reshape the school into a humane community. The system is low tech, not hard to learn, it doesn't require a big investment in metal detectors and it works."

In the creation of a peaceable kingdom at Bean, the "process"-as even the kids now refer to the disciplinary system-is clearly adult-controlled and aimed at stopping all inappropriate behavior, even the little mean stuff-name-calling, teasing, exclusion ("you can't say you can't play" is one school maxim)--which can rapidly deteriorate into bigger, much nastier stuff. Just as bullying-prevention practice in class prepares kids to deal with the real thing, the discipline system prepares adults to take immediate and unambiguous action when kids misbehave. "You may only have 15 seconds to act, so you have to be prepared," says Davis. The bedrock of the system is a discipline code aimed at preventing "behavior that violates the rights of others-that is, hurting others with words or actions." Offences , ranging from verbal teasing to hitting, pushing, shoving, grabbing clothing to violent physical and verbal aggression, including threats and sexual, racial and religious harassment, are ranked in order of seriousness and linked to small and escalating consequences. Children who have broken one of the rules are almost always required to call their parents to report the infraction and write a "think about it" form-several questions obligating them to contemplate what they did, why, and how they might make up for it.

Nine-year-old Brianna, for example, during one whirlwind recess, socked a 3^rd-grade girl in the arm, pulled another off the jungle gym and pinched a third. She felt justified; the three had been chasing her around the schoolyard during an earlier recess, and wouldn't stop when she told them she didn't like it, so she waited til the next recess to extract her revenge. She was reported, written up, taken to the principal--all violations that involve "hurting others," including verbal teasing, are referred to the principal--and received her "consequences" (five recess detentions). She had to go to Davis, who talked to her about what she was going to tell her mom and helped her answer the questions on her "think about it" form. The first question--what had she done? "These girls were chasing me and I accidentally might of hit one," Brianna promptly offered. "No, Brianna, I might believe in the accident theory if there had been only one incident, but there were three-and they happened in the recess after the one when they chased you," Davis patiently countered. "Try again." And so it went, Brianna denying, then minimizing, then rationalizing each act, until, finally, cornered, she burst out in anguish, "But they were chasing me!" "I know," said Davis gently, "but we're not talking about what they did. I want to know what you did. We don't solve problems here with our bodies.

Davis works with students on the forms, which he may have them rewrite three or four times until he feels they have stretched themselves to the limits of their personal capacity for self examination. After Brianna's grudging admission to all three offences, he helped her answer the other questions, which required a certain amount of reflection about herself, about what she does, about the impact of her actions on other people. What had she done? Why was the behavior wrong? What harm might it have done? What problems was she trying to solve? How would she handle the problem next time? What sort of amends would she make? In what Davis calls "bully logic," Brianna had assumed that hitting, pulling and pinching were the only way she could get justice for being harassed. After working with him on the forms, she sighed and said she guessed she did deserve to stay in for recess, but because she had been honest, her punishment should only be missing three recesses instead of five! In Davis's view, by accepting the legitimacy of punishment for her acts-and even in requesting leniency (which she did not get) for telling the truth-Brianna had made some progress away from the rationalizations and excuses of bully logic toward greater personal accountability. Had Brianna's acts been more serious or repeat violations, Davis, the principal and her teacher might have met with her parents to work out an individual behavior plan at school and at home. It helped both Brianna and her parents (who wondered if it were fair to punish her and let the other girls go) to know that the school will also question the three girls, who themselves will suffer consequences for their role in the affair of the jungle gym.

The rules and the values encapsulated in Bean's discipline system-no meanness, physical or verbal allowed-have been rendered as familiar, unambiguous and omnipresent a part of the school culture as crayons and chalk. "The system has become part of the culture of the entire school, " says Principal Pfeiffer. "Wherever kids are-in phys ed, in classes, in the cafeteria-every adult is on the same page and will respond to problems in exactly the same way." Kids themselves have learned how to recognize mistreatment and they know they can count on action from adults when they see or experience abuse; they know they have a duty to protect each other from harm and they know they have "whistle blower" protection from retaliation when they do.

At the core of the system is an enormous commitment by the entire staff to ferreting out truth about even minor violations, no matter how inconvenient and time-consuming. In fact, the system has been a hard sell with other principals Davis has known because it takes so much time and energy; in the beginning, one smallish incident of fighting or bullying not witnessed directly by an adult may require four or five hours to investigate, talking to children and weighing testimony. "Why do I have to put this much time into such little stuff-why can't I just drop it, if I'm not sure what happened?" asked one harried principal, between meetings with a district supervisor and a school supplies salesman. The payoff, however, is that once the initial investment in the system is made-that adults will spend whatever time it takes to get to the bottom of something--children then expect that if they misbehave they will be caught, sooner or later. "It is almost inevitable that kids who break the rules will be caught. Inevitable consequences teach cause-effect thinking. Inconsistent consequences teach distrust of authority." says Davis. By default, honesty becomes the best policy. As a result, it takes far less time, sometimes only minutes, to get to the bottom of almost any incident. There is also much less rancor from students about a system based on cause and effect, a system that is, in its way, as impersonal and inescapable as freezing rain in a Maine winter.

Just like adult crime, childhood bullying and other forms of aggressive behavior may be quashed, if not entirely abolished, by relentlessly enforcing a hard-nosed legal code, but a school that depends solely upon the exercise of raw authority would look more like a juvenile detention center than a true community of learning. The Bean School system does more than stifle aggression; it nourishes children's inner capacity for moral thinking, compassion and mutual respect. And it appears to largely succeed because it is grounded in what might be called a policy of intelligent love, applied with both firmness and faith in the possibilities inherent within every child. "Kids are brighter than we give them credit for; they can live up to our expectations, if we give them expectations worth living up to," says Reynolds. "Discipline only works in a context of ample nurture for everybody," adds Davis. At Bean, good behavior gets as much if not more attention than bad; friendliness, kindness, courtesy, respect, mutual care are both modelled and rewarded by adults. There is, for example, the wildly popular "Caught Ya" practice, whereby adults who have seen a child be helpful or polite place his or her name in a container, from which there is a drawing once a month and the child whose name is picked wins a small prize.

But, no matter how dedicated and committed school staff members are to a system of discipline and moral training, they would get only lacklustre results if parents were not behind the effort. Bean works hard to involve them in the life of the school-special events, a weekly newsletter, a bustling volunteer program-and in the classroom activities and discipline of their children as well. The parents always get a full written report of infractions, but beyond that, there is also daily communication between the school and parents. The kids bring home notebooks with homework assignments, which parents check off as the child does them; often, the teacher and parent use the notebooks to include notes back and forth about a child's progress or problems.

For Davis, the line between teaching and counseling is often indistinct. He is currently seeing about 14 parents on a monthly basis along with the child's teacher, and has often met with parents weekly until a child's academic or emotional problem is under control. Occasionally, he says, he gets strong hints from parents that they cannot manage their children and would welcome help. In conjunction with a teacher and often other specialists, or the principal, Davis and the parents will work out a discipline plan for the parents to use at home. In that case, the parents are asked only to reinforce good school behavior at home-give the child extra nurture and positive rewards every time she or he behaves well-while the school handles the negative consequences on bad days. There will be weekly phone calls or notes or personal meetings, all focused on the good behavior that shows up at school, which Davis and the teacher are careful to attribute to the parents' doing. He also inevitably finds himself working with family problems that spill over into school-supporting kids who have lost a family member, or whose parents are divorcing.

Making an anti-bullying and discipline program work at Bean or any school requires a willingness to break the old taboo against the terrible "p"word-punishment. "Most teachers have taken a child psychology course or several, and have been taught that punishment does not change behavior, only positive reinforcement does, so they believe they must ignore the bad behavior and reward the child when they ‘catch' him being good," says Davis. "I have never seen this approach work in changing bullies. As an analogy, nobody would find the roads safe if the police ignored people driving too fast while drunk, while stopping and thanking people who were obeying the laws." Davis unapologetically defends a black-and-white approach to law and order. "The only way to keep the system fair is to stay away from shades of gray," says Davis. "The more questions you have to consider about the motivation and circumstances for each individual act, the harder it becomes to establish any coherent policy." The system is, in its way, a real-life introduction to the impartiality of the law, ideally free of favoritism and capriciousness, as impersonal and dependable as traffic court-you speed, you get caught, you pay the fine.

Can a school, no matter how enlightened, make up for the failures of society and really change the course of childrens lives-particularly if they have obviously learned their abusive behavior at home? Can a school teach children self control, respect, empathy and personal accountability if these qualities have been neither modelled nor taught by their parents?

It appears that a school can, but only if it has the leadership and staff solidarity to ensure follow through over the long haul, only if everybody in the school buys into the program and only if the parents and community support it. But these programs are nothing if not labor intensive. Creating a peaceful and civil school climate is not done in a day, any more than teaching a child how to read, write or do math. "The biggest mistake schools make is taking a potshot approach to a problem like bullying-never staying with a program long enough for it to become institutionalized and engrained in the culture of the school," says Virginia Dolan, school district psychologist in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. "Programs fail when they are not done systematically, with a team approach at the school in collaboration with the community." Davis will not do a workshop in a school unless the school sets up a specific committee for bullying prevention and unless he can train the entire staff when he arrives. He keeps in touch with schools and schedules follow-up visits, but if the school community itself is not sufficiently organized and cohesive to carry the ball, no number of intense workshops will make it happen.

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Our view of schools over the past few years has been too much derived from worst case scenarios of murder and mayhem: in the mind's eye for many of us, Dick and Jane have morphed into Blackboard Jungle, the Grade School. In a sense, the Bean School is a salutary reminder that an ordinary elementary school without much money (Bean's budget is a parsimonious $4,000 per year per pupil) can be a powerful force for good in children's lives. The success of such a school does not require a higly specialized curriculum, but rests fundamentally on old-fashioned values like devotion, patience, consistency, commitment, good humor and common sense. Harvard child psychiatrist Robert Coles, author of The Moral Intelligence of Children, argues that children become moral beings not through didactic lectures or harsh discipline but through countless daily conversations and encounters, stories and lessons, in which habits of honesty, kindness, responsibility, tolerance and courage are steadily, painstakingly instilled by wise and attentive adults. Every interaction and event, spontaneous or carefully planned, writes Coles, "becomes part of the child's minute-by-minute moral experience: a take, slowly built up, on what matters and why, what doesn't matter, how one ought to talk and be with others, how one ought to think of them and of oneself, and . . . for what underlying reasons." At Bean, the daily practice of moral lessons-the system of rules, the reading and acting out of The Hundred Dresses, the think-about-it forms, the thousands of informal and spontaneous "teachable moments" that occur between adults and kids during a school year--not only teaches children concrete behavioral skills, but sharpens their ability to reflect about their own beliefs and actions; the goal is teaching them to become moral thinkers rather than blind rule followers.

Americans believe passionately in the power of school to mold and transform the society in which they existmay not be witness the current presidential campaign, in which education is the single most hotly debated issue. And, for all the moral confusion in our society, all parents want their children to be good. According to a 1993 Gallup poll, 90 percent of American parents believe that public schools should teach core values, including the golden rule, honesty, moral courage, caring, tolerance and democracy. At a time of vast social and spiritual anomie, a school like Bean may provide both a stabilizing moral and emotional foundation for children and a significant antidote to an often destructive, even poisonous mass culture. It may not be too far fetched to say that in a society as riven and fragmented as ours, the culture of a good school can become something of a blueprint that children carry with them out into society when they leave. "Teaching kids social skills does more than simply empower them and prevent bullying, it creates citizenship," says school counselor Saufler, co-director of the Maine Project against Bullying. "If we want to build a society in which people care about each other, school is one of the few institutions today where that can be taught."

For more information about bullying prevention, visit www.stopbullyingnow.com