Anti-Bullying Rally at Bolingbrook HS

Submitted by Valley View School District 365U

The third annual Rally Against Bullying, sponsored by the Bolingbrook High School PTA, will be held the evening of Tuesday, Dec. 1 in the Claar Family Auditorium at the high school.

The event will include an opportunity to examine VVSD high school students’ entries in the Walgreens Expression Challenge a half hour before and after the actual rally which begins at 7 p.m.

“Research at thousands of schools by the National School Climate Center shows that, although adults believe that social as well as physical safety is a mild and sometimes moderately severe problem, students consistently rate school safety as a ‘severe problem,” said Robin Lichty, president of the BHS PTA.

The facts are:

• In many school communities, over 50% of students do not feel safe in school.
• The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention affirmed that bullying is a public health problem.
• One in three students reports being bullied.

“The BHS rally is designed to allow our community to show it wants to empower our students to do what is right when doing right is hard to do,” Lichty said. “Students need to know that we support their efforts to speak up when they see bullying happen, when they are bullied and when they feel the need to be a bully. We need to instill resiliency in them to survive in any situation.”

The tentative program includes motivational speaker Dwayne Bryant, and local published author and poet James McGrew. Anyone wishing to speak should contact Robin Lichty at 630-660-3215.

The event is co-sponsored by the Walgreens Expressions Challenge. Information on the challenge is available at http://www.expressionschallenge.com/.