Tina Meier advises R-6 students to watch their backs

Mrs. Meier advised the students to do two things: first, to vigilantly protect their privacy when using any internet feature; and second, to stand up to the bullies in their school.
“You need to be the ones who step up,” Mrs. Meier said. “I’m not telling you to throw a punch, but you can be that voice for the person who can’t stand up for themselves. Doing what you’re doing now – nothing – isn’t going to help.”
Mrs. Meier said the reason she was going into the schools to talk to students was because: “There are a lot of things going on people don’t want to talk about.”
Mrs. Meier said there had been 180,000 hits on Megan’s two My Space accounts since the tragic story of her death broke in November of 2006 Megan has had 11,000 friends sign on her memorial page (www.meganmeierfoundation.org).
“I hear stories from kids around the world about bullying,” she said. “It’s unbelievable. It wasn’t just Megan. If it had just been Megan, I wouldn’t be doing this.”
Mrs. Meier began with a home video, explaining that her daughter had a weight problem in school and didn’t feel like she fit in. In seventh grade the bullying intensified.  In the hallways and in the lunch line, boys would stomp their feet and call Megan names.
Megan got to where she didn’t want to go to school.
Mrs. Meier asked how many of the students had seen the movie Mean Girls, which is about ‘posses’ of kids being rotten to one another.
“What do you do about it?” she asked. “When a group of friends think it’s funny to pick on another kid?  People know it’s going on, but just walk by and ignore it. Who likes being called names?”
Bullies have a way of seeing the thing that really hurts us the most, Mrs. Meier said, and are able to pinpoint what we ourselves are most self-conscious about. It may be hard to understand what’s going on inside a bully’s mind to cause them to behave so cruelly.
“Bullies have issues, problems at home, with their own self-esteem,” she commented. “Something inside makes them lash out at other people.”
They target the most vulnerable.
Because of the bullying, Megan’s parents took her out of that public school and placed her in a private  school. Megan, an eighth grader, was on the volleyball team. She was going to get her braces removed. Things were looking up.
Megan was going to celebrate her birthday on Nov. 6. She would turn 14. She asked for a My Space account.  Her mother said yes.
Megan met a teenage boy on the social networking site, named Josh Evans. He was friendly and complimentary to Megan.
“It was great for Megan, uplifting,” Mrs. Meier said.
Megan and Josh chatted for about 4 ½ weeks.
During this time, still a little suspicious, Mrs. Meier inquired about the site with the police. They told her there was no way they could find out if a My Space page was for real.
What the family didn’t know at the time, was that the My Space site Megan was visiting was a hoax created by adults, a neighbor who lived four houses down. The site was being visited by this neighbor’s daughter, a 13-year-old girl who had been a former friend of Megan’s, but with whom she’d had a falling out, and an 18-year-old female employee, a type of clerical worker of the adult neighbor’s in-home business.
“They never came forward,” Mrs. Meier said. “The 13-year-old daughter of a neighbor across the street told us about it.”
Mrs. Meier said she carefully watched Megan’s visits with “Josh” on the site.
“We were in the room when they talked,” she said. “There was not one negative anything. If there had been, he’d be gone.”
Everything was going fine, she said, up until that last day.
“I watched, I monitored, but I still got fooled,” Mrs. Meier said.
On the evening of Oct. 15, the messages suddenly turned sour.
“Megan received a message that was not that nice,” Mrs. Meier told the students. “The next day, Oct. 16, she received a horrible message from the boy, and then a ton of horrible, hateful messages.”
Mrs. Meier said it was the 13-year-old daughter and the 18-year-old employee of the adult neighbor, who wrote the messages.
Mrs. Meier would find out later that the 13-year-old was “upset because she’d seen Megan talking to her girlfriend. That’s what caused the switch in the tone of the messages.”
Bullying has been going on forever and the Internet is just a new type of outlet for hostility, Mrs. Meier said.
She asked the R-6 students how many of them had chatted online or had instant messages; how many had text messaging or email; how many had My Space, Facebook or VIBO accounts? Nearly all the students had one or the other.
“Never give out your password,” she said. “That’s the number one thing, never give it out. Not to your best, best, best friend, not to a boyfriend. Keep it to yourself. You don’t  know who your best friend is going to be tomorrow.”
Megan’s neighbors had apparently shared some of Megan’s messages with others. Those others responded through electronic “bulletins.”
“Bulletins are a cyberspace way to gang up on who can hate on who,” Mrs. Meier said.
It was more than Megan could take.
“She felt the whole world was against her and there was no way out,” Mrs. Meier said.
Megan took her own life on Oct. 17, 2006.
Mrs. Meier warned the students that, “People on the Internet are not always who they say they are.”
She cautioned them against mistakenly thinking they were safe because they lived in a small town or in the country.
“Don’t get caught up in thinking it doesn’t happen to us,” she said. “In small towns, secluded, where everybody knows everybody, it still happens.”
Megan and her family lived in Dardenne Prairie, a community of about 7,000 residents about 35 miles from St. Louis.
The cyberspace world knows no bounds, she said. She told the students that she had talked to Chris Hanson the week before for an hour. Chris Hansen is a correspondent for NBC News’ Dateline NBC who has done several investigative reports on online sexual predators.
“He said it was amazing how little he has to be put online to attract a predator,” she said. “They come out of the woodwork. That’s the reality that we live in.”
Mrs. Meier asked the students how many of them had received uncomfortable messages? If they had, she wanted to know if they had talked to their parents about it.
“Are you afraid they’d flip?” she said. “Or are you afraid they would automatically shut it off?”
It has been her experience that the majority of kids don’t tell, she said.
“They don’t want their parents near their cell phones; they don’t want them to see their text messages; or know their passwords; or see their instant messages. If parents look over their shoulder, what happens? They shut it down quickly.”
Parents don’t want to know every single thing, Mrs. Meier assured the students. Just that their children are safe.
“Definitely talk to your parents,” she said.
Parents need to listen, to believe their kids, and be supportive.
Mrs. Meier believes that schools must set stricter guidelines regarding bullying.
“Missouri has a no bulling policy, but most schools across the state get an F,” she said.
She asked the students if they went to their counselors about being bullied.
One of the students responded, “If you go to your counselor, you’ll be seen as weak.”
“That’s right,”Mrs. Meier told him. “People will think you’re a dork, a snitch. When you walk out, things will be 10 times worse. So what’s the point? But if don’t do something, how is it going to change?”
Mrs. Meier advised the students to go to their counselors. “Over and over again. The school has to set the limits. But it takes you guys to make the change.”
Mrs. Meier also talked to the students about controlling their own voices to not be mean or hateful.
The video Mrs. Meier presented to the students ended with a teenage friend of Megan advising his peers, “Watch your words. They do hurt. They affect everyone. It doesn’t hurt to be nice.”