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It is easy not to pay attention to the jumble of Speak Up—Stop Bullying posters lined inside the Addison Street Windows Gallery across from the Berkeley Repertory Theater. 

Pedestrians pass by without even looking up. Put together by Berkeley middle school students, the pastel coloring and hand-drawn printing don’t have the polish of modern street ads. It is only by stopping at the window, and spending some moments reading and absorbing, that the observer begins to understand the power of the message and the depth of feeling that inspired the Berkeley Unified School District middle school student exhibit. 

• A grave site dotted with headstones—marked “RIP anti-Semitism, RIP racism, RIP discrimination, RIP ageism, RIP stereotype”—below a banner “Maybe One Day...” 

• Three juvenile faces filling a poster, wide-eyed and innocent, different colors and genders, with the message “We May All Be Different But That’s Not A Reason To Bully.” 

• A familiar television cartoon scene, Bart Simpson being strangled by his father, Homer, but with the added slogan “Stop The Abuse.” 

• A poem by Willard student Valerie Dohrer begins with “The teasing starts. The tears hidden and, kept inside,” and asks, “Where are the allies? Too scared to help.” 

• A printed list of stark statistics that tell endless tales of terror and fear in California public schools: “An estimated 160,000 miss school every day out of fear of attack or intimidation by other students.” One reads, “27 percent of California middle and high school students are harassed because they are not ‘masculine enough’ or ‘feminine enough.’” And another, “For children in grades 6-10, nearly one in 6—or 3.2 million—are victims of bullying each year and 3.7 million are bullies.” 

Berkeley Unified’s Stop Bullying project had its genesis in a two-dad Berkeley family looking for a Berkeley public school to send their daughter six years ago, and was kickstarted by the hate-crime murder of Newark transgender student Gwen Arujo in the fall of 2002. 

“We were looking at public schools in Berkeley for our daughter,” said Jon Logan, “and we didn’t feel particularly comfortable in terms of our type of diversity. Berkeley Unified School District just didn’t have the teachers or support or tools to deal with questions of homophobia. That was surprising to me. I thought it would be a slam dunk, finding an appropriate school in Berkeley. But as budgets go, priorities go, and some things get pushed aside.” 

Logan and his partner, Kevin Woodward, eventually put their daughter in private school, where she remains. But “because we pay our taxes here, and because we have a deep concern for our community, we’re very dedicated to making Berkeley a better place,” Logan said. 

Logan and Woodward, who operate the Logan Family Fund out of the East Bay Community Foundation in Oakland, got the chance to put that dedication to work after the 2002 hate-crime murder of Arujo. The murder, and subsequent trial of three of Arujo’s high school classmates, caused media outlets to converge en masse on the South Bay to report the events. Patrice O’Neill of Oakland-based The Media Group—which had produced an award-winning documentary about community response to hate-crime in Billings, Montana—approached the Community Foundation about funding a film about the Arujo murder. The Logan Family Fund led the funding efforts for the film, and Logan said the discussions surrounding those events—and the need for a formal violence prevention curriculum in the public schools—led the Logan Family Fund to begin efforts to set up anti-homophobic and anti-violence programs in the Berkeley schools. 

“The thrust is against bullying and violence in general,” Logan said. “We’re not focusing solely on the homophobic issue, although that is one component. But students are picked on every day for any and every reason... Kids have a tendency to turn on people one day just because they don’t like them for some reason, and other kids fall in line.” 

The Stop Bullying campaign began in January of 2004 in Berkeley’s middle schools and involves both teacher training and regular work with students. This fall the program sponsored a contest for posters, essays, poems, and spoken word on anti-bullying. Logan said that the Addison Street Windows Gallery display is just a small part of the submitted entries. 

“An amazing number of kids participated,” he said. “Each school held their own contest, and each school had evening programs where students read their poems or performed their raps or showed their artwork.” 

Logan said the next step is to move the stop bullying program into the district’s elementary schools and high school campuses. 

“While outside donors have supported the beginning of this program and provided consultation, this is a BUSD-based program, and it should be,” Logan said. “It needs to be an internal school-run program, with the full endorsement of the administration and the school board.” 

He said that support has already come from Superintendent Michele Lawrence’s office, which authorized a full day of in-service training last year on bullying issues. His goal for the program is to have a full-time staff person at each school to train teachers and provide a place where students can go to for support.  

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