Bullying in Today's Schools

I am still very shocked by the number of suicides recently due to cyberbullying. I had no clue that the issue was as bad as it is and unfortunately it took the death of all these kids for people to catch on. The Phoebe Prince story is still a big deal even though it happened months ago. I was reading in a magazine a couple weeks ago about how the school is now forever tainted by what happened. All other schools in their area just refer to them as the bully school. It's going to take a while for them to get over what happened. Even our school is still thought of as the party school where students died on homecoming. However, bullying here at DHS isn't as bad as it is in other places. This could be because not as many people see it or because the people being bullied don't speak up. I think another reason we do not have a huge issue with bullying is because our school is not very diverse. We are almost all white middle class citizens in a very Jewish area. There isn't much that someone can make fun of someone else for that wouldn't also apply to themselves. I don't want to say that no one is bullied here because I'm sure there are some, but it is not as prevalent as in other places. I think that there are also a lot of students who are confident enough in their own skin that can brush off something a bully would say or laugh about it with a friend. For the most part we are a very tight knit group of kids since we all grew up in a small town where we all know each other. I think that if we want bullying to be eliminated completely then it is the responsibility of the students. We need to educate everyone about bullying and how it affects people. We could do something similar to Challenge Day or something like what Highland Park does with the Anti-Defamation League, where they bring together all the freshmen to discuss bullying and share personal stories as a way to stop it before it even starts. If we make it known that bullying is not acceptable and even try to make it look like it isn't cool then I think kids will stop since they won't get the glory that bullies may have gotten in the 1950s.