Our Town: Kids helping kids Our Town: Kids helping kids (November 30, 2005)

by Don Kazak

Katie Ransohoff, 16, and her sister Julia, 14, have never been victimized by schoolyard bullying.

But they know a lot about it -- enough to visit classes in December at Escondido Elementary School in Palo Alto and La Entrada Elementary School in Menlo Park to talk about bullying.

The Menlo Park sisters, who are students at Castilleja School in Palo Alto, have been collecting information about why bullying is harmful to children and posting it on two health-oriented Web sites sponsored by the Palo Alto Medical Foundation. One of the sites is for teens and one for pre-teens.

"We didn't see it being addressed anywhere else," Julia said of bullying.

"We like the whole idea of kids helping kids," Katie said.

After visiting fourth and fifth graders next month, the girls will modify their anti-bullying message for middle-school students.

"We want to teach kids about positive relationships when they're young," Katie said.

The old image of boys knocking each other around is part of bullying, but for girls it tends to be teasing and belittling, called "relational aggression."

"There's a lot of different kinds of bullying, even online," Julia said.

Caring about other kids isn't something new for the sisters. They are both runners and were recruited to run cross country and track at Castilleja. Instead, they started a running club two years ago to raise money for a San Jose hospice for dying children, after a young cousin died from leukemia.

"We decided we could do that (run for their school), but we wanted not just to run for our own health and benefits but to be able to help other people in our community," Katie said.

Their focus now is on compiling information about bullying to share with others.

Bullying "is a constant concern for principals when you put that many children together," Palo Alto school board member Camille Townsend said. "Having a safe school site is a top priority."

Townsend said principals borrow ideas from each other and tailor them to their schools. "Each principal may handle it a little differently," she added.

"We try to be proactive" to keep bullying from starting in the first place, Principal Suzanne Barbarasch of Jordan Middle School said. "It can be a problem in middle school."

Derek Chan, now a student at the University of California at Irvine, wrote about being bullied when he was a student (coincidentally) at Jordan. He is one of the eight students contributing to the two medical foundation Web sites.

He wrote that another boy teased him "like there was no tomorrow" to the point where he just wanted to keep away from him. His mom encouraged him to tell his teacher. The teacher told the other boy to be nice to Derek. The bullying stopped.

"Holy cow! That's It?? Just like that?" Derek wrote.

"I am in college now, but I still believe that no one deserves to be bullied or teased," he wrote.

"There are kids who come home not feeling well, and you don't know why," Julia said of kids who have been bullied.

Katie and Julia "are just amazing girls," said Nancy Brown, a developmental psychologist at the medical foundation who coordinates the teen Web sites.

"They're organized, they're great students, they fit everything into their lives and they still have time to play," Brown said. "I mostly just try to guide them and help them prioritize. They're great role models for their peers."

Both girls both like biology classes.

"I love biology and science," Katie said. "I've been working on a research project at Lucile Packard (Children's) Hospital," which included observing a heart operation last summer.

"I would like to be a cardiac surgeon," she said. "I was moved by seeing a heart beating."

Julia, when asked what she would like to do after school, is silent for a moment, appropriate for a ninth grader.

"I know I want to go to med school," she quietly replied. Well, she only has eight or nine years left to decide on a medical specialty.

"We have quite a few M.D.s on both sides of our family," Julia added.

Of course.

The medical foundation Web sites are www.pamf.org/teen and www.pamf.org/preteen. Senior Staff Writer Don Kazak can be e-mailed at dkazak@paweekly.com.

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