On our show this weekend we are discussing bullying with our special guests Lee Kaplan, who is the star and writer of the play ‘Bully,’ and Stacy Pendarvis from the Monique Burr Foundation for Children. We discuss many of the causes, symptoms, and effects of bullying as well as things for parents and teachers to look for and ways to help as well as the bystander effect. We also take a few questions from callers about Common Core and discuss cyber-bullying.

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Listen to September 21, 2013 episode

Jay Gray: Welcome to The Conversation. I am Jay Gray, joined here with Dr. Ali Kasraeian – 340-1045 to get in on the conversation. So, what are we talking about today?

Dr. Ali Kasraeian: So welcome everyone. We are talking about bullying today. So I am very excited today because we are talking about bullying on the coattails of a show that a good friend of mine from back in grade school, or actually junior high or seventh grade I would assume – Lee Kaplan. And he is joining us by phone in between two shows. And he is the star and actually wrote the play ‘Bully,’ which has received a lot of attention and a lot of accolades. It is a one-man show that is basically an autobiographical story of his personal story and journey of being bullied. And the interesting thing is it was inspired by a sixth-grade journal that he kept with bullying.

Also in the studio is also going to be Stacy Pendarvis, who is from the Monique Burr Foundation and we have had before. It is an amazing organization who does a lot with raising awareness for bullying, which affects unfortunately about 3.2 million students a year. Lee, welcome!

Lee Kaplan: Thank you for having me, you guys. It’s a pleasure to be with you.

Dr. Ali Kasraeian: Congratulations on the show Bully, which we are fortunate to have in Jacksonville at a theater Jackson San Marco. And thanks for joining us in between shows. I can assume that you must be exhausted so we won’t tax you too much.

Lee Kaplan: Well listen, this is great. I appreciate the opportunity. I just wrapped up my first of two shows for today and I will be returning to the theater for the 8 PM show today.

Dr. Ali Kasraeian: And myself and my family will be joining you at 8 PM because I have been telling everyone about this since I saw you in New York. I was very fortunate at the timing of a meeting I was at that corresponded with the presentation of Bully at the Fringe Festival in New York. I took a good friend of mine to see this show and I will tell you, nothing is cooler than being incredibly impressed by friends that you have. And Lee, I tell you it was an amazing show. Tell us a little bit about what inspired you to do this show or where it came from.

Lee Kaplan: I really appreciate what you said, Ali, and I am so glad to hear that you will be there tonight. I am really looking forward to that. And you know, I found really I was inspired to put this show together when I found this journal. My folks and I were looking through this old school stuff from my middle school days just a couple of years back and we came across this journal that I kept when I was in sixth grade and I actually used this journal as a prop in my show and read through some of the things that now are shocking to me in terms of the specificity that I had about things that were going on with my peers and kids who weren’t treating me very well. And I realized and recognized that I could really structure a show based on some of the things that I was reading in this journal and on some of the things that kind of came back to me from seventh and eighth grade memories that I had that really honestly I had either blocked out or just hadn’t thought about in a long time.

Dr. Ali Kasraeian: Very interesting. And I will tell you that with the show the thing that I took away from it was right afterwards the Monique Burr Foundation popped into my mind because I remembered when I was looking through the statistics of everything when putting that show together and it was mind boggling – like 3.2 million kids are affected. Approximately 160,000 teens skip school each day because of bullying. And another staggering thing that we see a lot unfortunately in the news today is about 75% of school-related shootings have been directly related to harassment and bullying issues. So when you hear that statistic and are kind of going and reading through that journal and your experience with bullying, what are your thoughts there?

Lee Kaplan: Well I think quite honestly that our awareness of statistics like that and knowing that administrators and teachers are certainly more informed today than ever about the long-lasting implications and repercussions that can come from these kinds of bullying attacks I think quite honestly is something that is a very positive change I am seeing take place. Unfortunately, you’re right. The statistics and the numbers don’t lie. I myself have quoted those same numbers when talking with students and parents at some of these talk backs that we have been having after each of the shows. And sadly, almost without fail, in these talk backs that we have been having in schools, Q&A sessions that I have attended over the past few months. Kids will regularly stand up and they will say very bravely, “I am being bullied here and it won’t stop. What do I do?” And it’s wonderful to have all of the structures and the systems that are being put into place but the truth is that teachers have so much responsibility and so much to do in the classroom that it is difficult to monitor everything that is going on there. And as we all know bullying takes place not just in the classroom. It can take place in the hallway, in the lunch room, outside on the play field, and of course as we all know the cyber-bullying element is now stronger and in a force that it never has been. And kids are regularly saying, “How do I get the cyber-bullying to stop?” And it’s a real challenge and I am just glad that there is so much more attention on it now.

Dr. Ali Kasraeian: Well Stacy, what do you think about all that?

Stacy Pendarvis: Well hey Lee, it’s Stacy Pendarvis from the Monique Burr Foundation for Children. And I am hoping to get out and see the show. Our executive director Lynn Leighton saw it last night and said it is fantastic. So we just want to thank you for helping bring awareness to this issue. So first of all thanks for all you do – and talking to kids afterwards, I think they need somebody who understands what they are going through to listen to them and help them and give them a voice to speak up. So I think what you are doing is amazing and we are just really appreciative of everything and we are really looking forward to meeting you and seeing the show.

Lee Kaplan: Thanks so much.

Stacy Pendarvis: You’re absolutely right. I think the issue is that there is a lot more awareness today now versus maybe when you were experiencing the bullying, but we still have a long way to go. The numbers are staggering and there is such a discrepancy in how different people see bullying. Administrators see it based on the law and the definition of bullying and teachers see it a certain way and students see it a certain way and parents even see it a different way. So we have to get everybody on the same sheet of what it is and how we react to it. And we go out and do facilitator trainings for our Speak Up, Be Safe program in the schools in Florida and I hear it all the time – facilitators, counselors, and teachers say, ‘We really don’t know what to do and how to react to stop it.’ So I think that is a huge issue – prevention education in the schools and how do we educate teachers and counselors to better react and respond to bullying and even pre-bullying behavior when they see it.

Dr. Ali Kasraeian: So Lee, when you’re looking at this stuff – to take it to a personal level, when you are reading through that journal and it takes you back to the child in the sixth grade that wrote that – one, how did that make you feel and two, what do you think the lasting implications of that are? Besides inspiring you to do something good with it – how do you think that affected you throughout your maturation to where you are now?

Lee Kaplan: I think that’s a great question, Ali, and in fact something along those lines came up in today’s talk just a little while ago. I certainly look at this journal and I read through things that I wrote and it is devastating. I just – I said it earlier today. It’s hard for me to believe that I had to hand in this journal on a semi-regular basis to my teacher who put the little check mark in the top right corner and gave it back. And I didn’t feel like anybody was really reading it and I felt like I wasn’t being heard. And so that is certainly what comes to me when I look at this journal. And I use the journal as a prop in my show. And then in terms of the long-term repercussions – there are actually studies that I have been reading recently that have really charted the effects on people 10 to 20 to 30 years after experiencing this. And there are detrimental, lingering effects in terms of social integration, the comfort level of people who have been bullied, who have experienced bullies, and being bullied, and feel in their current lives in terms of their social skills and I