Had a story on this program spearheaded by Lynn Bravewomon in yestesday’s paper and got a request to toss up a blog about it for discussion purposes.

Also got a call from Lea Lyon, who wrote a book in 2005 called “Say Something” that also encourages kids to take an active role in quashing bullying behavior at school. You can learn more about Lyon and her books on her website.

Here’s a little more on an anecdote mentioned in the story, from Bravewomon:

“With increasing frequency, as students learn how to speak up when bullying language is heard, they do so. There are stories of many students at many schools who are empowering one another to identify themselves as allies and speak up to their peers to stop bullying language. Student allies support the target by breaking the silence that so often occurs with the witnesses of bullying. One example occurred in an elementary classroom. Two girls overheard a passing and cruel comment muttered to this target by a child moving across the classroom.  They both stood up and clearly stated, “We don’t tolerate bullying at our school, it hurts everyone who hears it, stop it now.”  Students and teacher alike were surprised and impressed with this well-timed and effective display of ally behavior. Their teacher, who had been working with the Safe and Inclusive Schools Program and teaching the importance of being allies, praised the girls and continued teaching. The student who had been the target of bullying  reports that after 2 or 3 weeks of support from a variety of allies in his class, the occurrence of bullying fell from multiple times daily to ‘maybe one time in a week, maybe less’. This student also reports he feels comfortable going to all parts of the recess yard and that people are friendlier.”

Hayward Unified is easily the most popular subject of discussion here at the HayWord. Anyone with a desire to stop talking about the district and start talking for it has just such an opportunity: a colleague of mine pointed out that  Hayward Unified is looking to ramp up its public relations staff, what with the following job postings. This one is for the PIO/Community Outreach Officer. This one seems redundant, maybe it’s the same post, but  it’s for a Public Information Liaison.  Here is one for a Lead Publications Assistant.

Here’s the story on that part of last night’s meeting.

I will update this post with more information when I have a moment, but I have some other things to get done right now so I figured I’d at least get that out there.

Had a story on last week’s State of the City event, a Neighborhood Alert affair at Southland Mall. I ran out of room in the story before I could get to Police Chief Ron Ace’s update on what’s going on with his department, so here it is.

Using the latest available figures from Dec 2009 to Dec. 2010, Ace said crime is down compared with the previous year. Violent crime down 7 percent, property crime down 14 percent, overall down 12 percent.

He acknowledged that 13 homicides for 2010 is a considerable uptick from the previous year’s seven, but noted that six of them happened in the first six weeks of the year, 11 in the first six months. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s this week’s calendar. Lots of Hayward stuff going on — highlights include Burbank neighborhood meeting tonight, City Council priorities meeting tomorrow night, dueling State of the City vs. school board meetings on Wednesday. Read the rest of this entry »

UPDATE: 100 percent reporting, it’s Armas, Brunner and McGee.

Here’s what we’re looking at with most of the mail-in’s counted. I won’t be able to update the blog too often; either watch Twitter.com/erickurhi or get results on our Alameda County election page.

Contest	# of Votes	% of Total
NP – Annette Walker	4308	43.46
NP – Jesús Armas	4300	43.38
NP – Lawrence M. Fitzpatrick	1261	12.72
Write-in	43	0.43

Contest	# of Votes	% of Total
NP – Lisa G. Brunner	4046	25.19
NP – William L. Mcgee	3905	24.31
NP – Audie Bock	3202	19.94
NP – Sheila Sims	2696	16.79
NP – E. Sue Lafferty	2152	13.40
Write-in	60	0.37

Check out Frank Goulart’s downtown Hayward tours. I’m not trying to sell them, but he did an abbreviated version for the Review and it was a very good, fascinating time!

Here’s the story from last night’s meeting.

One thing that’s been kinda bugging me is Jim Drake’s relentless, and often misnomered, accusations about the fingerprinting program. He says that HUSD’s is flawed — it leaves open a loophole that could potentially let molesters into classrooms. District policy has a single exception to the fingerprinting rule: Parents who have a child in a class can volunteer their services in that class and only when the teacher is present. HUSD is adamant that they are stringent with fingerprinting policy, with only that exception.

But I suppose on the other hand that any such loophole is scary. Why that exception? I don’t know. I’ll ask and let you know.

UPDATE: Spoke to Greg Jones and Anna May about their plans for a school board run. Story to come.

Just a quick note to let everyone know there probably won’t be many HayWord posts in the next week. I’m taking a bit of a vacation.

Try not to be too venomous.

BTW, an outgoing a lameduck city councilwoman is indeed engaged to a former city manager. Both said they left their posts to run for the school board in the coming election.

EXPLANATION FOR EDIT: Anna May said she doesn’t fit the definition of a lame duck because she wasn’t defeated in an election. Valid point.

I don’t think there’s any problem with that… except for the fact that with state receivership as a real possibility, a run for school board … well, it just seems like a run for a position of no power at all.

Ask them about it. She’s at 886-ANNA. He’s at 886-GREG. They’re not answering my calls.

We had a recap story run over the weekend on tomorrow’s election. In the interest of making the information we’ve put out easily accessible and all in one place, here are links to our profiles — which include links to the candidates’ websites – and other election information:

Ralph Farias Jr.

Lawrence M. Fitzpatrick

Mark Salinas

Sara Lamnin

Marvin Peixoto

Steve Oiwa

Here’s our story on the write-in candidate for mayor.

And here’s a blog entry with all the candidate statements.

And here’s the city’s election information webpage, which now includes second pre-election campaign finance statements.