Before 15-year-old Huntingtown High School sophomore Priscilla Berstler was taken away in handcuffs, she knew her mom would be crying and that knowledge made her want to do the same.
“I cried because I was thinking of my parents. ...I could tell my mom was crying,” Priscilla said.
Priscilla and her parents were actually the lucky ones it was all acting in which Priscilla portrayed a teenager arrested for bullying a fellow high schooler to the point in which her target killed herself.
The project was done by a group of Huntingtown High School students as part of the national program The Great American NO BULL Challenge, led at Huntingtown High School by business teacher Lynne Gillis.
Gillis explained that for the challenge, of which she learned through an email circulated by Huntingtown High School Vice Principal Nancy Miller, students film a 2- to 5-minute video about cyber bullying and its results and then upload the video to the website www.nobullchallenge.org and try to get as many votes for the video as possible.
Prizes for some of the top vote-getting videos include a trip to the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, Dell Laptops, $5,000 scholarships, iPhones and a three-episode production deal as the grand prize.
Gillis said the Huntingtown High School video titled “I Am” was entered in the Community Partnership category, meaning the six sections of the video were filmed with numerous local partners.
The first section, which shows the birth of a girl who will ultimately fall victim to bullying, was filmed at Calvert Memorial Hospital.
The second section was an elementary playground scene showing that bullying starts at a young age.
The third section was filmed in a local residence showing middle schoolers starting to bully the female victim online.
The fourth section was filmed in the Huntingtown High School hallway and shows the victim being set up into falsely thinking a guy is interested in her, as bullies film her embarrassment to post to their Facebook and Twitter accounts.
The fifth section was filmed at Lee Funeral Home in Owings and shows that the victim ultimately killed herself after not being able to take the bullying anymore.
The sixth section was the courtroom scene in which the main bully was found guilty and taken to jail.
Gillis said she hopes the film will ultimately teach people that “bullying happens to just about everyone.”
“She’s cute, she’s smart, she comes from a great family; she was chosen just randomly,” Gillis said of the victim portrayed in the video.
“Bullies don’t understand the longterm effects that they can have on the victim and the victim’s family and the school and the community and [themselves] and their own family,” she said.
“There is a serious consequence. ...You don’t want to find yourself responsible for someone else taking their life,” Gillis said. “You need to stop before something tragic happens.”
“I didn’t like it because I’m a nice person,” Priscilla said of portraying the bully, continuing that social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter do seem to make bullying worse.
“People post embarrassing pictures of people just because they look weird in it. ... And when people make fun of people with mental disabilities, that makes me so mad,” she said.
In the courtroom scene filmed last Thursday at the Calvert County District Courthouse, Priscilla’s character was described as a straight-A student athlete who was active at her church, yet she was ultimately described as a “danger to her community” and thrown in jail.
Huntingtown High School sophomore Kayla O’Neil, 15, of Chesapeake Beach said just being a part of the video made an impact on her.
“I’ve never really been a bully but now I really know how bad it can be because [suicides due to bullying] really do happen,” she said.
Sixteen-year-old Huntingtown High School junior Madison Williams of Huntingtown portrayed the victim, who ultimately took her own life after the guy set-up that Gillis described as “the straw that breaks the camel’s back.”
“She embarrasses me in front of everybody,” Williams said, admitting that she personally “didn’t know how to react because I’ve never been bullied before.”
Williams did say that the experience taught her “to definitely stick up for someone who’s being bullied.”
Prince Frederick defense attorney Tracy Delaney portrayed Priscilla’s attorney and said she has had some juvenile cases in which bullying has played a role.
“I think bullies come from all walks of life,” Delaney said, continuing that adults are often too busy to really look into what their kids are doing online.
“As long as they’re coming home on time parents think their kids are safe. ... You don’t pay attention to what kids are doing on the internet; it’s what kids do,” she said.
Delaney said she has had family law cases in which failure to supervise kids, therefore leading to bullying, has been cited.
Priscilla’s parents Cindy and Michael Berstler of Huntingtown portrayed her parents in the film and agreed that juvenile bullying is made worse with the internet.
“With social networking, now everything is online and kids have no recourse for things they say,” Cindy Berstler said.
lbuck@somdnews.com
