Groundspark

“I showed Let’s Get Real to my students, many of whom do not want to have these conversations and have a hard time sitting still. They were riveted. The discussion afterward was profound.”
— Kim Carter, director, Monadnock Community Connections School, Keene, New Hampshire

GroundSpark is partnering once again with GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network for National No Name-Calling Week, which runs through January 27^th. GLSEN is our longest-running partner organization, and in support of No Name-Calling Week, we’re offering free streaming of our film Let’s Get Real (view the trailer below)!

GLSEN and GroundSpark first started working together back in 1992, when Helen Cohen and I were looking for educators who might have the courage to address anti-LGBT prejudice in their classrooms. We attended one of the first GLSEN conferences (back when the “E” was a “T” for teachers and GroundSpark was called Women’s Educational Media) and told the attendees about our vision for a world where educators would proactively address all kinds of bias, including homophobia, in their classrooms.

The contacts we made at that gathering helped us go on to make It’s Elementary—Talking About Gay Issues in School.  Groups of teachers all over the country then mobilized to host the first screenings of the film, and in the process, launched many of GLSEN’s first chapters.  Kevin Jennings, GLSEN’s founder, is prominently featured in our follow-up film, It’s STILL Elementary.

Years after the making of It’s Elementary, we decided to take on bullying connected to all kinds of bias, and produced Let’s Get Real, which is now used in thousands of schools across the country. GLSEN also expanded its focus and today is at the forefront of addressing bias-related bullying of all kinds.

GroundSpark has been a No Name Calling Week partner since day one. This year we are excited to offer free streaming of Let’s Get Real for the whole week! It’s a great chance to preview the film and see if it’s right for your school or community organization. Or for parents, to make time to watch it and have a much-needed conversation with your 5^th – 9^th grader.

Visit our No Name Calling Week page for simple steps to get started!

Last night the Vallejo Unified School District 30 miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge, voted 4 – 1 to continue its anti-bullying curriculum for students in its elementary, middle, and high schools.

The curriculum was put in place as the result of a settlement negotiated by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California on behalf of a lesbian student in the district who was being harassed —by faculty and staff at her school—because of her sexual orientation.

The district agreed to bring age-appropriate lessons about diversity and standing up against bullying and name-calling into every classroom, and also to provide training to all faculty and staff about anti-gay harassment and discrimination. GroundSpark’s films and educational resources are being used at all grade levels to help implement this plan.

At a contentious board meeting last night, parents were split in their opinions about the curriculum. Many, including the mother of the young woman who had been harassed, applauded the district’s efforts to prevent further harassment.

I saw how it affected her,” Sheree Hamilton said in reference to her daughter, Roxanne. “She fell into a deep depression. She didn’t laugh anymore. She fell behind in school.”

“Teenagers, gay teenagers committing suicide: why? Because this education was not there,” said another parent, Franklin Hernandez.

As has been true in other school districts, the Pacific Justice Institute, a conservative activist organization opposed to any discussion of LGBT people in schools, played a role in organizing parents to oppose the district’s anti-bullying work.

At last night’s meeting, some speakers objected to the district having a curriculum that acknowledges families headed by gay or lesbian parents, or curriculum for teenage students that discusses anything related to sexual orientation or gender norms. Others claimed that the district’s implementation of this curriculum without giving them the option to “opt-out” their children from the lessons constitutes “bullying” by the district.

Despite this vocal opposition, the school board members stood behind the anti-bullying curriculum.

We are very proud that the district is using our Respect for All Project resources to help implement its initiative. Elementary school students watch That’s a Family! which introduces respectful awareness of what it means to grow up in families headed by parents who are divorced, single, different races, lesbian or gay, as well as those who are being raised by adoptive parents or guardians.

In middle school they are watching Let’s Get Real, which helps open up discussion about harassment connected to racial tension, religious differences, anti-gay stigma, difference in family income, immigration status and more.

And in high school, students are watching Straightlaced—How Gender’s Got Us All Tied Up, a proven catalyst for helping all upper level students think about how pressures to conform to gender role norms can lead students to collude with anti-gay harassment, engage in risky sexual practices, or get violent.

As part of GroundSpark’s response to this fall’s wave of media attention on teen suicide related to homophobic bullying and harassment, we have been offering free streaming of all of our Respect for All Project films through the end of the year.

Just click on our anti-bullying spark to find out more.

(For That’s a Family! click here for free streaming in support of National Adoption Day)

As news of five suicides committed by youth who were targeted with homophobic harassment has spread across the country, GroundSpark has redoubled our commitment to helping communities do a much better job of addressing anti-LGBT bias, particularly in school.

We are making some of our tools available for free for the next two months
in an effort to get them out far and wide during this time of intense public awareness.

But we need your help. And I don’t just mean by sending a donation.

We need your help in shaping the public conversation and getting GroundSpark’s powerful tools into the right hands.

Click on this “spark” to share our resources and analysis with everyone you know who works with youth. We’ve made it very easy to insert in an email, post on Facebook, Twitter, or any website.

There is a lot of talk right now about more stringent laws and punishment for bullying. We definitely need strong, federal and state anti-bullying legislation. The full solution, though, involves much more than tough laws and rules.

We need to go deeper and address the underlying ignorance and stereotypes that contribute so painfully to the bullying epidemic. We need to build a culture of empathy and compassion. We need to get everyone on board—every student, every parent, and every adult who works with youth.

In recent days, many excellent new initiatives have popped up to support LGBT-identified students and their allies. GroundSpark is building on the good work of our sister organizations by sharing what we do best: sparking the transformation of whole schools from places of conflict and alienation to communities of respect and support.

We know from experience that people get inspired and motivated when they can see moving examples of honest, caring discussion about tough issues like bias-based harassment.

That’s what GroundSpark—through our films, curriculum guides and trainings—can provide. So for the first time our curriculum guides are available for free online and parents and students can stream our films for free into their homes.

Talking about how all students are negatively affected by anti-gay bias, no matter how they identify, is not easy. Nor is talking about stigmas regarding gender norms, race and class. But we have been doing this work, thoughtfully, and with great success for close to fifteen years.

To do our job well, though, particularly at this moment, we need you to help us spread the word.

You can help us reach out to the parents of the youth who do the bullying, the parents of youth who are scared to death to speak up on a classmate’s behalf for fear of being targeted themselves, and the parents who don’t know what to do when their own kids are harassed.

You can help us reach the science teachers, baseball coaches, janitors, and school bus drivers so they understand that it is an important part of their job descriptions to model how to respond to anti-gay slurs.

You can help us give administrators and guidance counselors support and tools to launch in-depth dialogues and school-wide commitments that address bias and prejudice in serious, constructive ways, and not just through discipline.

Please take a moment to share GroundSpark’s Respect for All Project with everyone you know who cares about youth. We’ve brought together our best tools on addressing bias, particularly homophobia. All we need now is you to join our team and spread the word.

Just click here and you’ll see how easy it is to get started.

We’re committed to change. Join us.

Debra Chasnoff
President and Senior Producer

At the end of April, our Respect For All Project facilitators, Nancy Otto and Scott Hirschfeld, led a training in Asheville, North Carolina centered around our anti-bullying film Let’s Get Real. The training was organized by Safe Schools for All, an emerging alliance in western North Carolina of organizations committed to addressing bias-based harassment in the region’s schools. Scott kicked off the session by sharing a gripping suicide note of a 14-year old boy, named Hamed who, after being relentlessly tormented by his peers with slurs like big-nose, four-eyes, geek and fag, 14-year-old Hamed became so depressed that he saw only one way out.

GroundSpark trainer Nancy Otto (standing) facilitates a small group discussion

The training attendees—teachers, after school youth service providers, principals, parents, and a couple of clergymembers—asked if we could share Hamed’s last note to his parents, which Scott read out loud at the training. And so we are reprinting it here below. It was printed in the book Cyber Bullying: Issues and Solutions for the School by Shaheen Shariff (Taylor & Francis, Inc.).There is an article about Hamed online.

Here is the excerpt from Hamed’s five-page suicide note explaining his decision:

“Dear Mom and Dad, The first thing is, I love you Mom and Dad, but you didn’t understand why I had to commit suicide.  There was so much going on and I tried to cope with it, but I couldn’t take it anymore…It was horrible.  Every day I was teased and teased, everyone calling me gay, fag, queer, and I would always act like it didn’t bug me…But I was crying inside me.  It hurt me so bad ……and when people said it, my own friends never backed me up.  They just laughed…  I know that you are going to miss me and that you will never forgive me, but you will never understand.  You weren’t living my life.  I hate myself for doing this to you.  I really, really hate myself, but there is no other way out for me…I love you Dad and Mom.  Please, please tell the people at school why I did this.  I don’t want somebody else to do what I have done.  Mom, after my death please, please go to schools and talk to kids that bullying and teasing has big consequences…Please visit my grave often so I’m not lonely.”

After watching Let’s Get Real and going through the training, the 65 trainees were each eager to start working on the action plan they developed for their own schools and community groups. “It’s an intense way to start off,” Scott reflects, “but it certainly gets us all on the same page about how high the stakes are and how important it is that we all work harder to address these issues.”

I’m Sukh, an intern for GroundSpark and a student of public health interested in the issue of school bullying as a public health concern and novel ways of preventing it.

Two weeks ago on KGO News Radio, I heard David Lazarus discussing the topic of bullying with listeners. Some questions that came up include, what makes bullies bullies? What makes victims victims? How can victims defend themselves? Many listeners pointed to self-defense classes as a way not only to build self-esteem, but as a technique for protection in case a bullying incident arose.

Bob Gordon, a member of my cohort in the San Francisco State University MPH program, emailed in and suggested that listeners watch a copy of Let’s Get Real and David Lazarus shared this advice with listeners…Thanks Bob!

So, can karate classes combat bullying? In the field of public health, there is a lot of emphasis on PRIMARY PREVENTION, which is targeting the entire population to prevent a negative outcome (i.e. bullying). While self-defense has its benefits and can be helpful in many ways, I don’t think these classes are the way to prevent bullying. Rather I feel that self-defense is a method of treatment—after the roles of bully and victim have been identified and the relationship between victim and bully has been established.

Methods such as those of GroundSpark’s are ones that are really effective in identifying the root of the problem. GroundSpark films Let’s Get Real and Straightlaced touch on the issue of bias, which takes form in racism, classism, sexism, and various other isms. Creating awareness of diversity and highlighting the need for respect can create an atmosphere of inclusiveness and acceptance. As a result, children can develop healthy relationships with each other that don’t involve bullying in the first place and karate can be valued as an extracurricular activity rather than a necessity.

Our film, Let’s Get Real, which (in case you haven’t heard!) features actual middle school youth—not adults or actors—speaking candidly about their varied and often painful experiences with name-calling and bullying, will screen tomorrow at the First Annual Family Conference hosted by the MEGA Family Project!
This conference is the first of its kind in the Southeast, and will be a great opportunity for LGBT parents, prospective parents, families, their children, friends, educators and community members to come together to discuss LGBT family issues and advocacy. MEGA’s Family Conference will have four tracks that attendees can choose from – prospective parents, parenting, schools, and social justice.

Just a note to say that we have some great new Respect for All Project trailers that are now up on YouTube and the New Day Films website. If you’ve been curious about these films in the past and need a reminder of their power, these trailers are a great reminder! Check them out and let us know what you think!