Bullying prevention remains a reoccurring theme throughout the WW-P district. But to focus on spreading the message among the student body, a third party has been brought into two West Windsor-Plainsboro schools, where she’s right at home.
Jillian Palmieri, a former seventh grade teacher in Monroe who grew up in West Windsor and attended public school here from K-12, is the creator and owner of the anti-bulling program “Bystander: A Portrait in Apathy.” The odd title combines both her mission with the program and her backgrounds as a theater major and teacher of language arts.
“It’s my belief that the only option we have to get rid of bullying is to get bystanders to stop thinking in an apathetic way and start living in an empathetic way,” Palmieri says.
It all starts with acting the part — as bullies, victims, and bystanders. Palmieri comes to school to work with a random group of students and let them demonstrate her lessons to the entire school. The young entrepreneur schedules visits to schools on a weeklong basis for two to three hours per day. Students don’t have any preparation for working with Palmieri before she meets them on a Monday, allowing for three days of practice before every Friday performance.
Participation is not mandatory; teachers or guidance counselors nominate kids “who they think would benefit from the experience or are natural leaders,” says Palmieri.She usually asks school administrators to pick as diverse a group as possible. “The more diverse the group, the more likely that everybody in the audience can relate to somebody,” she says.
Palmieri’s program is aimed at students in sixth through eighth grade, but she’s done the performance with students from grades five through twelve. She has presented it in 42 different schools in southeastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey including South Brunswick, Jackson, Marlton, Haddonfield, and Tenafly. Her weeklong program was first introduced at Grover Middle School last spring and returned for another performance recently. In mid-November she also led the program at High School South, where she graduated in 1998.
Palmieri does not market herself to a lot of high schools because she was initially afraid that older teens would not have a positive outlook on participating in anti-bullying programs. Her visit to South surprised her, however. She says kids were very receptive and interested in talking about bullying. She attributes their interest level to hearing about bullying from the unique perspective of the bystander.
“If they’re older the kids take a longer look back at the things they might have done and what they might have been a part of. They can reflect on what they could have done to make that situation better, so they have a more adult perspective on things and they can view that now while they still have the opportunity to make things right with whoever it was they were involved in a bullying situation with,” Palmieri says.
Middle school is her target market and what she considers “the optimal time to try to install good morals and good beliefs.” Teaching seventh graders gave her insight into their perspectives, helpful for developing her program.
“Kids would come in one day and be great and well-behaved and the next day they’re a completely different person because they’re constantly having this battle about who they want to be, who they want to be like, and who they want to have as friends,” she says.
At Monroe Palmieri taught language arts and worked as the boys’ soccer coach. “We would have bully-prevention assemblies and I would bring my students to them, and I didn’t think that my students were getting much out of them. I didn’t think that they were addressing the bullying and the consequences for victims, so I would bring my class back and talk to them about statistics about bullying and bullycide and the kids would say ‘don’t you think we should hear about that in the assembly?’ and I would say you know what, you’re right,” Palmieri said.
During a poetry unit Palmieri had students collect poems written by kids who were bullied on the Internet. She assembled the poems and “organized them in a theatrical way” and created a powerpoint that went along with it as well. Her plan was to have students recite the poems as just a class project “just to get more of a feel for what bullying is,” but once the platform was developed the school’s administration took notice. The assistant principal asked Palmieri to perform for the whole school.
It was so impressive to me that this heterogeneous group of kids — who weren’t performers and didn’t necessarily want to speak up in front of the school about bullying because they were not all victims, bystanders, or bullies — were really excited about this opportunity to present this program to their classmates. The fact that they were able to memorize it and perform it just blew me away,” she says.
Palmieri says her class was ultimately asked to perform for the Monroe Board of Education. That opened her eyes to the opportunity that other kids and other schools could be interested in her program.
The current focus on anti-bullying efforts has boosted the appeal of the program, and current events have led to discussions about bullying situations and being an “innocent” bystander. On Palmieri’s visit to South she says there was a lot of talking about the Penn State football child sex scandal.
“We were talking about what it means to be a bystander and how other coaches who were identified, plus school administration, janitors, and personnel who knew something was going on and didn’t act on it to protect somebody else fit the basic definition of a bystander — having information that you could use to protect somebody and instead protecting yourself and ignoring the person who needs the protection.”
The first time Palmieri ran the program in WW-P was at Grover last spring, six months after Tyler Clementi’s suicide in September, 2010. Palmieri added Clementi’s picture to her powerpoint, and she says the students understood the connection to bullying. Palmieri incorporated Clementi, Dharun Ravi, and Molly Wei into her program as examples of the vast reaches of bullying behavior.
“Wei can be the epitome of what a bystander is — they sometimes just let their friends do things and they’re there, and they may know it’s wrong or they may feel it’s not right, but they still allow it to happen and they become wrapped up in a situation that they could have avoided. She’s been a really good learning and teaching tool for me to tell kids about what it means to be a bystander and how one decision can really affect the way you’re viewed by the world and the way you feel about yourself,” Palmieri says.
Palmieri says New Jersey’s new legislation is a good thing, and she tells students that the law’s in place to give them a sense of reassurance that if they report something, it must be followed up on. This in turn encourages kids who may not speak up about a bullying occurrence otherwise as they may feel the school staff would not be responsive.
Teachers can gain much from Palmieri’s program as well. Palmieri says they become more aware once they see her program and performance as they realize the impact it has on victims. As a teacher Palmieri never caught any bullying act going on, leading to her current goal for bystanders “to be out there as this little awareness group, to see the bullying and step in or see the bullying and report it.”
Palmieri has high regard for her experience in West Windsor-Plainsboro schools. She attended Maurice Hawk, Dutch Neck, UES, Community Middle School, and High School South (when it was the only high school in town). Her older brother, Chris Ritchie, graduated in 1994 and went on to Philadelphia University and the School of Visual Arts, where he earned an MFA. He is a graphic designer and owns his own company, COA designs, in Manhattan. Among his notable work is his sister’s website, Bystander.us
There is a situation that Palmieri uses in the script for the performance tracing back to her junior year of high school. Palmieri recalls that a group of guys in her grade “trained” a boy to hop when they snapped their fingers. Palmieri says they never physically forced him to do that but because they were part of the popular group and the student did not have a close circle of friends he may have been lacking in confidence.
“I felt he was intimidated, and he just did it to avoid any further confrontation with them,” she says.
Palmieri was never bullied as a child but she recalls first encountering bullying — as a bystander — in the fourth grade. What she witnessed struck her as “unkind, but not something that I could have prevented myself.”
“There was a particular kid in our class who was on the receiving end of a lot of bullying behavior. At the time there was something that I thought was wrong, and I think I always tried to be an advocate for kids growing up by being friendly, outgoing, and non-exclusive — I tried to be friends with people in every group or clique there was at school,” Palmieri said.
However, Palmieri says that traditional representation doesn’t paint a clear picture. “One of the problems is that parents still think of a typical kind of big, physical bully who sticks out and can easily be recognized by their demeanor. But now it’s so much different and parents have not made that transition in their minds. The bully could be the class president, they could be an unassuming straight A student, the varsity athlete — bullies take on a lot more different forms, not just physical,” she says.
Palmieri’s mother and father moved to West Windsor in 1978 when her older brother was two years old. Her parents are originally from South Jersey but when her father, a research scientist for Johnson & Johnson, began working in Raritan they needed to find a more central location for his commute and good schools for the kids. Her mother was a homemaker and both children were heavily involved in their schoolwork and playing soccer.
In high school Palmieri found another passion in theater and performing arts, which laid a building block for her current career. She performed in four musicals in her four years at South under the direction of Demi Ashton, who she says was “such a great inspiration that I took every class that she offered.”
In college she joined an improv troupe and did some small productions in theater as well. With the original goal of becoming a drama teacher like her mentor Ashton, Palmieri entered Rutgers in 1998 with her ambitions set on a 5-year combined B.A.-M.A. program in drama education. But by the time she applied to graduate school Rutgers had discontinued that program. Palmieri then earned her master’s in K-8 education while getting her BA in theater.
After living in Franklin Park and North Brunswick Palmieri settled in Yardley with her husband Nick, another West Windsor native who works as the director of accounts payable at Madison Square Garden. The couple has a 2-year-old daughter and Palmieri is pregnant with her second child, due in March.
Palmieri’s life has come full circle. Now, as a young mom running her own business she has had success, but Palmieri says an eventual return to teaching could be possible. “If there was an anti-bullying specialist position I think I’d be a perfect fit. I know it’s a lot of work but I would like it,” she said.
