The Bully Project (Completed )

About the Film

The world we inhabit as adults begins on the playground. The Bully Project opens on the first day of school. For the 5 million kids who'll be bullied this year in the United States, it's a day filled with more anxiety and foreboding than excitement. As the sun rises and school buses across the country overflow with backpacks, brass instruments and the rambunctious sounds of raging hormones, this is a ride into the unknown. For a lot of kids, the only thing that's certain is that this year, like every other, bullying will be a big part of whatever meets them at their school's front doors. Every school in the U.S. is grappling with bullying - each day more than 160,000 kids across the country are absent because they're afraid of being bullied - but for many districts it's just one more problem that gets swept under the rug. With unprecedented access to elementary, middle and high schools across Sioux City, Iowa, The Bully Project will follow from the first day of school through the last, as students, teachers, coaches, principles and parents battle bullying in their district. In hallways, classrooms, busses, football practice and band rehearsals we'll see where prevention programs end and the tough work of leadership begins. At West High, where no one is left on the sidelines during dances and the homecoming royalty challenge stereotypes of popularity, insisting, "Here, it's cool to be nice," we'll show how a school's culture can be transformed into a place where bullying isn't tolerated, offering hope and a real model of change to schools who say it cannot be surmounted. But what does bullying look like? The Bully Project brings us into the everyday lives of several young people who are on the receiving end of daily beatings, taunts, made the subject of Facebook hate groups, excluded from their peers and sent threatening text messages - to name just a few items on the never-ending laundry list of torment kids dole out. From Gas City, Indiana, where 8th-grader Garrett Owsley has a court-appointed escort trailing him throughout the day to keep his bullies at bay, to Tuttle, Oklahoma, where 16-year-old Kelby Johnson has been hit by a car, beat-up and made the subject of bathroom graffiti by her classmates since she came out of the closet, The Bully Project will be the first film to document the real face of bullying and its consequences. Every week, there's another story in the news that grabs the nation's attention and brings into focus the devastating toll bullying can have on children, families and communities. While these suicides, school shootings and other acts of violence may appear as 30-second segments on CNN, the lessons they offer are all too quickly forgotten. The Bully Project will take a much deeper look into these tragedies and how they could have been prevented, starting in Yazoo County, Mississippi, where this September, Aisha Lalor brought a loaded handgun on her school bus in an attempt to scare off the kids who picked on her to and from school every day - after adults failed to protect her. As fall turns to winter, yet another suicide takes us into the home of David and Tina Long, who lost their son Tyler this October, after years of relentless bullying. Despite the Long's numerous visits to Murray County's schools to gain protection for their son, the bullying continued unchecked, even after Tyler's death, when the bullies showed up in school wearing nooses and circulated pictures of Tyler in his casket. With nothing left to lose, the Longs are taking Tyler's suicide as a call to action, bringing this small Georgia community's bullying problem to the forefront, and taking to task a school system that denies any culpability in their failure to prevent this tragedy. Combining verite footage with interviews, The Bully Project will give a never-before seen perspective on bullying and its costs, not only on children, but in the workplace and its impact on our national identity and global politics, speaking with bullying prevention activists, educators, world leaders and experts in the field.Whether we've been the kid thrown against a locker or the witness who overheard a classmate being called a fag or the organizer of a negative Facebook group, bullying is something we've all experienced - and all have a stake in stopping. The Bully Project seeks to be catalyst for change and to turn the tide on an epidemic of violence that has touched every community in the United States - and far beyond.