Local educational professionals gathered Friday to talk about what they can do to combat bullying in local schools, as well as in society as a whole.

The all-day conference took place in the Martin Luther King Jr. University Union and ended with a balloon release on the Library Quad, despite rainy conditions.

The conference began with a preview of the film “The Bully Project,” which was released in April 2011, and with a keynote address by Dorothy Espelage.

Espelage is the child development chairperson at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who is a bullying expert and has been featured on many television shows and in magazines. She has also been studying the issue of bullying for more than 20 years.

Espelage spoke about how the media influences the way bullying is portrayed and makes it seem like it is an epidemic when it is actually not.

“The media want to raise public awareness, but by doing so they are almost causing a panic,” Espelage said. “This panic is going to hurt us if we do not slow down and deal with it correctly instead of rushing in.”

She said part of the reason bullying is portrayed this way is because of the belief that a link exists between bullying and suicide, which Espelage calls bullycide.

“Only 15 percent of children suicides can be linked to bullying,” she said. “The other 85 percent have to do with mental illness.”

Espelage said despite these statistics, bullying is still a real issue that needs to be dealt with in a timely manner.

She talked about how issues she saw when visiting a central Illinois junior high school in 1997 are still things she sees today.

“We visited Mary Miller Junior High School in Georgetown, and the kids told us that the kids who are the bullies are the kids who are popular,” Espelage said. “We knew about this high social status then, but we did not do anything about it.

She said another common misconception is that this is an issue that is not just in the schools, but in all of society.

“It is not just a problem in our schools; it is a part of the fabric of our society,” Espelage said.

Along with the keynote were 14 presentations separated in four different time sessions throughout the day.

One of the sessions, titled “Early Warning Signs for Early Educators,” was taught by Geena Anselmo, a senior special education major, with the help of her mentor, Sham’Ah Md-Yunus, an associate professor of elementary education.

They presented different strategies to teach children about how to cope with bullying. After explaining the strategies, they broke up the audience into groups and gave them situations to determine which strategies could be used.

The two have presented at two national conferences, including the National Conference on Undergraduate Research in 2011.

“After taking a class with Dr. Md-Yunus, she asked me if I would be interested in helping her with some research,” Aselmo said. “It has been honor to get to present to all of these different people.”

The conference came to a close at about 3:30 p.m. with performances by the EIU Dancers, undergraduate students who told the stories of students who had been bullied, and the recitation of an anti-bullying pledge that was compiled by Kyle Davis, a senior mathematics education major.

Davis compiled the pledge after reading a few different pledges with similar goals, but said he wanted to make something that was “unique to the conference.”

The finale was a balloon release on the Library Quad, although Davis said the effect was not quite the same because of the rain, but it took on a new meaning.

“I think it was symbolic—just because it was different doesn’t mean it can’t be done,” Davis said. “Bullying is not an easy subject to talk about, but you still have to do it and then things can change.”

Amy Wywialowski can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected].