BULLYING ADDRESSED, CONT.
said he said he didn’t want to be part of anything that’s an effort to tear down the LRSD. District Superintendent Morris Holmes was in attendance along with several members of his senior staff. Holmes told the crowd that the district has been developing a strategic response to the reports since the story appeared, and said he would “go to hell and back” to keep students from being abused. He said he has talked to teachers and administrators over the past month, asking them one by one “what did you know?” “You need to know that we have not taken this lightly,” Holmes said. “It hasn’t been a game of, ‘We didn’t like what they had in the paper.’ ” After speaking about his seven years as superintendent of the Fort Worth Independent School District, which has a large Latino population, Holmes said that the issue of bullying is an “issue of power.” “Do you not know that the majority almost always abuses the minority? It’s a social fact. It’s a political fact. It’s an economic fact. It is a sexual fact. It is a pervasive fact in our society, and I know it well.” Later in the meeting, there were a few tense moments when Holmes turned to Griffen and spoke of people “questioning his character” in their response to the reports, including an Oct. 18 letter Griffen and the congregation of New Millennium Church sent to Holmes and members of the Little Rock School Board. In the letter, the congregation wrote that they did not “view the responses of Dr. Holmes or the Little Rock School Board as an acceptable acknowledgement that serious problems surrounding the issues of bullying and sexual harassment exist. In fact, we are dismayed by the reaction this far which amounts, in our view, to quibbling about whether Dr. Trevino-Richard’s work for
BRIAN CHILSON
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KNOWS THE FEELING: Griffen recalled his own experience with bullies.
the District constitutes a ‘study.’ ” Associate Superintendent Dr. Sadie Mitchell spoke about the district’s response so far, saying that she was “hurt to the core” after reading the story in the Times. “Hispanic parents have called us, angry, because something that happened in 2007 is now a priority,” she said. Mitchell said that the district has polled every school for information on their antibullying efforts and is evaluating their responses. The district has also formed an ad hoc committee to research the issues raised by Trevino-Richard’s study, and will soon launch a public awareness campaign on the issue of bullying. Mitchell said one of the problems the district has identified is that the LRSD doesn’t have a “refined curriculum” on dealing with reports of bullying. LRSD officials later volunteered the use of Chicot Elementary — one of the schools mentioned in Trevino-Richard’s research — as a site for the group’s next meeting, which Griffen said should happen in less than a month. Jorge Luna, who identified himself as
the owner of a Spanish-language radio station, rose to say that the group needed to do more to get the opinions of blue-collar Latinos with children in the district. “We see the doctors, teachers, principals [here today],” Luna said. “But what happened with the construction workers? What happened with the farm workers? What happened with the people working in the hotels? What happened to the people in the restaurants?” Local Latina attorney Cristina Monterrey told the group that in the Latino community, there is “a fear of coming forward,” which might be a reason bullying isn’t often reported to administrators by Latino students. “Everything starts when it’s reported,” Monterrey said. “A lot of these children, they come from a culture and they come from a background where there is this overwhelming fear of letting anyone know that something is being done to you.” Monterrey said that many Latino parents come from political systems where people are sometimes physically harmed for reporting wrongdoing. She asked the
LRSD to take that fear into account when coming up with a bullying curriculum. “There is a cultural barrier there,” she said. “There is a language barrier. And we have to reach out into that community to break down that perception.” Katherine Snyder, the principal of Booker T. Washington Elementary Magnet in Little Rock, told the group that she believes adult harassment and bullying are common today, and said children learn what they see from their parents. She said she’d been subjected to what she would consider bullying by a parent at her school within the past week. “I watch parents bully my teachers,” she said. “I watch parents bully their children, and I get bullied by parents. Many of my parents don’t know another way to communicate. I don’t necessarily think they’re bullies, but they do resort to harassment and intimidation because that’s the strategy they’ve found might work for them. I’m saying this because our children who bully are a symptom of a much larger problem.”
ROAD TEST, CONT. Continued from page 12 architects of StudioMain to plot out, with the help of neighborhood, business and city interests, a future vision for South Main. Several architectural balloons have been floated for the revitalization of the South Main neighborhood — or SOMA. The “PopUP” will “test the principles,” event organizer James Meyer said, of the Project Main Street design by Polk Stanley Wilcox architect Ed Sergeant that has gotten a good reception at City Hall. The plan calls for lane revisions from I-630 to 17th Street. To help set the life-size scene, “PopUp” organizers are temporarily detouring 40 trees en route to a landscaping project to
the three-block median. After a brief closure for set up, Main Street will reopen at noon Friday and 2nd Friday Art Night will be the PopUp kick-off, to coin a vigorous phrase, with the Cons of Formant providing music from 7-9 p.m. at the Bernice Garden at 14th and Main. There will also be food at the Oxford American at 13th and Main (a small sample of the menu at its future restaurant, South on Main, from Chef Matthew Bell; read more about Bell on page 56) and Midtown Billiards between 13th and 14th. Southern Gourmasian, Taqueria Alicia, Wishbone’s, Bryant’s BBQ and Catering and Philly’s to Go food trucks will fill the lot opposite the OA (formerly parking for Juanita’s). Goodwill will operate a store in a
vacant building on the east side of the intersection of 14th Street and Main and Etsy Little Rock will have vendors on the street. At deadline, the Dunbar Community Garden was considering joining the vendors. StudioMain, at 1423 Main St., will be the “home base” for the event, said Meyer, who is an associate at Witsell, Evans, Rasco architectural firm. On exhibit there will be the Arkansas chapter of the American Institute of Architects’ 2012 Arkansas Honors awards as well as information on the PopUp planning. North on Main, an installation of painted doors by University of Arkansas at Little Rock art students will be placed around the vacant United Systems build-
ing across from Community Bakery. The Oxford American and UALR students were planning an exhibit at the magazine’s office at press time. Saturday’s “PopUp” runs 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. with DJ King Julian providing music from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. The Central High Jazz Band is tentatively scheduled for Saturday afternoon. There will be canine as well as people traffic at a dog park on the grassy lot in back of the EZ Mart at 14th and Main (across Scott from the Villa Marre). The “PopUp” event runs 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Saturday. Main will return to its regular four-lane configuration on Sunday; it will be closed at 10 a.m. for crews to restore the street. www.arktimes.com
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