Highlighted Project: Girls and Bullying

Girls are a “little mean” to a classmate; emails are sent to other girls to ignore her and keep her out of group activities; the ostracized girl becomes depressed; her grades begin to fall . . .

In 2004, a collaboration of three day schools in the Jewish community — Community Day, Yeshiva and Hillel — approached the Jewish Women’s Foundation to fund a nationally known speaker on bullying, Rachel Simmons. The proposal included bringing Ms. Simmons in for a lecture as well as holding workshops for parents and girls after her presentation and was followed by a year-long program in the schools on bullying prevention.

The program was a huge success on many levels. Over 600 people attended the event from both the Jewish and general communities. Parents and teens stayed after the presentation and broke out into groups (girls separate from their parents) to address specific issues on bullying. And the year-long program resulted in a cultural shift among the girls in the Jewish day schools. As one participant stated, “When a girl started to pick on another girl in our school, a group of us quickly told her, ‘We don’t do that in our school!’”

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