Anti-bullying speaker's message to students: 'Be like Belle'

It came when he was watching a videotape of the Disney animated feature "Beauty and the Beast" with his family, and the villain Gaston was leading a torchlit mob of villagers toward the Beast's castle, all singing, "We don't like / What we don't understand / In fact it scares us. . . ."

Brown seized upon that example again yesterday, not in the living room of his home outside New York City, but in the gymnasium at Beaver Lake Middle School in Issaquah. And his audience consisted not of his own three children, but of 940 sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders.

Still, his message was the same: The Gastons of the world lead the villagers of the world in persecuting those who are different, or strange, or isolated, and they can wound with taunts and threats instead of pitchforks and clubs.

"Our words, our attitudes, our actions become our weapons," Brown told the students. "Sticks and stones can break my bones; unkind words can break my heart -- and there is no surgery for a broken heart."

Brown, 41, gives his anti-bullying talk at 140 schools a year for QSP, the school fund-raising arm of Reader's Digest. Yesterday he appeared at Eckstein Middle School in Seattle and Beaver Lake; today, he's stopping at Heatherwood Middle School in Mill Creek and Port Susan Middle School in Stanwood.

Physical harassment is not a major problem at Beaver Lake, which draws its students from the middle-class subdivisions along the Issaquah-Sammamish border, but verbal harassment is a different story, Principal Tim O'Brien said.

"We're pretty vigilant about it," O'Brien said. "We want school to be a safe place for kids, both physically and psychologically."

Nearly eight in 10 eighth-graders say they've been picked on, and 40 percent say it happens often, according to a report by the Seattle-King County Department of Public Health. The report was based on a 1999 survey of Seattle teens and a 2000 survey of adolescents statewide.

During his 45-minute presentation, Brown ranged across the gym floor, cracking jokes, invoking pop culture, mimicking the cartoon voices of Gaston, the Beast and Belle, Disney's name for the "Beauty" character. A skilled performer with a delivery inflected by the accents of his native Jamaica, Brown is a winner of the Toastmasters International World Championship of Public Speaking.

"Every day in America, 160,000 kids stay home from school because they're afraid to face Gaston," he told the students. When he asked them to stand up if they knew of even one child who had been teased, bulled or pushed around, nearly all 940 rose.

For the solution, Brown again pointed to the Disney film. In the movie, Belle reaches out to the Beast with love, and liberates the handsome prince trapped within.

"Your assignment for this holiday season, and the rest of the school year, is to be like Belle," Brown said. "Get to know the Beast in your school, and find the prince or princess trapped inside."

The speech left seventh-grader Jessica Peterman thinking about the future.

"I know my life is going to change," she said. "I'm going to really pay attention to the kids that don't have a lot of friends, and are alone at lunch."

P-I reporter Gregory Roberts can be reached at 206-448-8022 or gregoryroberts@seattlepi.com

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