Danville Student Organizes Self-Defense Training For Teachers

DANVILLE, CA — Danville may have been ranked the safest city in California for several years in a row, but it didn’t always feel that way to resident Sonia Sharma.

“One girl who I knew pretty well, she was followed and almost strangled by another guy, and she wasn’t able to defend herself,” Sharma, 14, told Patch. She said that she and her fellow Girl Scouts heard reports of their peers getting attacked at school almost every day.

Sharma decided that she wanted to help students be better able to defend themselves. She and her troop launched a program called Project emPOWER, and worked with the Town of Danville to form an after-school program where students could take self-defense classes. After, a successful pilot run, Sharma decided it would be more efficient to train PE teachers to teach self-defense instead.

“If you have a class like the model that we did for the pilot program, then you could train maybe 50 kids for one class,” she said. “But if you train three or four PE teachers, you can get to like thousands of students.”

So she did just that. This past summer, Sharma paid $500 of her own money to hire an instructor from the national United Studios of Self-Defense to teach PE teachers from Dublin Unified School and San Ramon Valley Unified School District how to incorporate self-defense lessons in their classes. With just 2.5 hours of training, Sharma says these teachers will be able to teach basic self-defense to 2500 students.

Now Sharma is speaking to other districts, including SRVUSD and Walnut Creek School District, that have expressed interest in trainings. Sharma said SRVUSD will likely conduct its own training this fall, and Walnut Creek has approved a pilot. She will fund this training with money she earned by winning the Marian Huhn Scholarship Award, which is given to 7th and 8th grade student members of the California Junior Scholarship Federation who demonstrate academic excellence and service to their school and community.

Sharma is also working with Danville Mayor Newell Arnerich and Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan to create a state-level bill to provide funding across the state for self-defense training. Arnerich has helped Sharma format the proposal, and she is currently in the process of gathering signatures of support. DUSD Superintendent Chris D. Funk has given his support, Sharma said.

But Sharma has even set her sights beyond California. In February, she helped sponso and fund a self-defense training for teachers of a girls school in rural India, where she said violence against women is common. She plans to fund another training in November.

“The reason I started this initiative is because self-defense should be taught in schools, just like math and science,” Sharma wrote in an email. “My goal is to get every kid in the school system have access to this. This is a basic skill and is missing from our public schools.”