those boundaries that we have created as adults. so it's within that -- yeah, you can clap. that's a good thing. so it's in that spirit that i welcome you here to the most beautiful city in the world, san francisco, on a very sunny september day, and i really thank you for being engaged in this conversation. this really is the conversation of the future, especially when we think that bullying now doesn't happen just in schools. with the internet and all of the technology that we have, it can happen anywhere. so thank you so much for being here, it's a great honor to host you here and i look forward to a very engaging conversation today. thank you. >> now i want to tell you my fae vifrt very favorite department of justice official.

eric holder is my favorite department of justice official. tom perez is my second favorite department of justice official. we are very honored today that tom perez has come from washington, dc, to give welcoming remarks here at this summit. tom perez is the assistant attorney general of the civil rights division in washington, dc, he was nominated for that position by president obama and sworn in in october of 2009 and we are all the lucky -- we are all very lucky that that happened in october of 2009. tom has spent his entire career in public service and on protecting the civil rights of our most vulnerable people. tom actually joined the civil rights division as a young lawyer and while he was there he prosecuted some of the most significant cases in the country. lawyers in the civil rights division get fanned out to places in the country to handle cas in mississippi and alabama and california and all

over and tom was one of those people. he was sent to texas to handle a very significant hate crime case when he was a young lawyer that involved a gang of white supremacists that went on a killing spree and ended up shooting 3 people and killing one when he was a young lawyer working in the civil rights division. he later served as a top deputy for attorney general janet reno, he was special counsel to ted kennedy and served as the president's advisor on civil rights issues. he was also director for civil rights at the department of human health services. tom, you will find, is passion ate and committed to equality and justice for everyone. tom, more than anyone i know, makes every single day in his life matter, whether it's focused on

anti-bullying work, voting rights, disability rights, housing rights, the eighth amendment, immigration, hate crimes or human trafficking. tom cares about all of those issues to his core and he works every day to make the world a better place. ladies and gentlemen, please welcome assistant attorney general tom perez. (applause). >> good morning, it's an honor to be back here. i got to spend some time last night with my brother who lives down the road apiece, his daughter is a sophomore in high school, she asked me if i wanted to go golfing at the presidio, i said i can't walk that much, i just had my knee replaced. melinda has been an incredible partner, it's a partnership

between our partners in the u.s. attorney offices and our partners in state and local government. when i think about the hate crimes cases and the other cases i've done, i've made friends for life with local law enforcement officers, with local da's and local community leaders who have been our eyes and ears. when i look around this audience i really appreciate the fact you have all the ingredients of reform and improvement. i have had the privilege of serving in the federal government, as melinda described, i've had the privilege of serving in state government as a state cabinet official back in maryland, i've had the privilege of serving as a local elected official and governor -- once a local elected official, always a local elected official. what i learned from that is partnership is what it's all about. if you want to confront the most vexing problems, you have to bring people across an ideological spectrum, you have to include the business

community, you have to include our nonprofit, our faith leaders. that's how you get things done, when you bring people together. and i look around this room and i see that you have already figured that out. i hope some of you had the opportunity to meet lee hirsch because i've done a lot of work with him in the context of our bullying. one of my favorite memories in my experience with lee is that we watched this film together with about a thousand people in sioux falls, south dakota, it was remarkable to watch the reactions of the kids in sioux falls, parents, educators, and we did that same q and a when we were done. i appreciate the wonderful words of your superintendent, that was exactly the dynamic in sioux falls and that's the remarkable thing, superintendent, is that this issue knows no boundaries. this issue knows -- it doesn't know class boundaries, it

doesn't know race boundaries, it's an issue regretablely that has been timeless. it seems we were all too frequently taught that bullying is simply a rite of passage, i went to christ the king grammar school in buffalo, new york, you would go behind the building and settle your scores at the end of the day and that was an accepted way of doing business. but we're learning and raising consciousness that, no, it's not an acceptable way of doing business. i've had conversations with the mother of seth walsh, of people who have literally taken their own lives and as a father of three, this isn't simply an issue of civil rights enforcement, this is something very personal. because i can't imagine the unspeakable grief that parents must go through. i can't imagine the unspeakable grief in murphiesboro, tennessee, when we talk to the leaders in the muslim community and they

tell me my kid doesn't want to go to school today because everybody is telling him, go home, you terrorist. i can't imagine the unspeakable grief in suburban minneapolis when the somali kids are told, you have to go home, you terrorists, get out of our community. they were born here, this is their community. i can't imagine the unspeakable fear in the aftermath of that horrible incident involving the murder outside of milwaukee, wisconsin, and you read the data showing here in the bay area the number of siekh american kids who reported they had been harassed in 2010. so we have a lot of work to do in sioux falls, south dakota, in buffalo, new york, in the bay area, across the country. we're doing just that. and the extent to which the profile of this issue has been raised in recent years i think is a

remarkable trib bought to all of you in this room. it's a trib bought to this president. i had the privilege of going to the summit that the president held. he has put his skin in the game. he has used the bully pulpit of the presidency, he has used the good offices of secretary duncan and the attorney general to make sure we send a very clear message as a federal government that we are all in this together, that bullying is indeed not a rite of passage and as you said so correctly and so eloquently, superintendent, that kids can't learn if they don't feel safe. kids can't learn if they can't be themselves. kids can't learn if they are afraid to turn the corner for fear that somebody is going to hurt them. kids can't learn if they perceive that their teachers and administrators don't have their back when something happens. and that's why we're here. that's why we're together. because we're here to get off the dance floor for a day and on to the balcony, to reflect

on what the best practices are, to listen and learn from each other and to do when end of the day, superintendent, i would respectfully submit, precisely what that kid asked you yesterday, to walk out of here and ask ourselves, what can we do differently and better? what did we learn? how can we apply evidence-based practices to the work that we do? because i've seen some remarkable things going on across this country. i've met, i was in birmingham, alabama, recently and i met a mother whose daughter fortunately did not take her own life but it was such a scare and she's put in place a number of programs and i found myself in awe of her. but at the same time, i come from a family of doctors, actually, i'm the only lawyer. all my 4 siblings were doctors, i promised them i'd never be a

plaintiff's personal injury lawyer and i kept my promise. but when i heard this very earnest person talk about how she's invested so much time and energy into bullying, i found myself asking, how do we know it's working? there are a lot of things that seem intuitively plausible and appear to be anecdotally moving the ball forward, but we need to move beyond that. we need to, among other things, figure out what indeed are practices that work and we need to understand in so doing that what may work in sioux falls may not work in san francisco. we get that. so solutions need to be taylored to local communities, solutions need to reflect the fact that there are many, many dimensions to this issue. let me tell you about the few dimensions that we see in the course of our work. russ land is the assistant attorney general and we've taken

partnership to new levels with the department. they have put out guidance on bullying and distributed it to all the jurisdictions around the country because we've often seen in our work that there are so many superintendents and school leaders that are doing great things, but there are others that either have the wrong policies in place or, quite frankly, don't know what to do. and so what they end up doing is nothing. and we cannot allow the appalling silence of good people to become the status quo, to quote dr. king. we must empower them with the tools that they have and they need to move forward and that is why we spend so much time working together on these issues. we've been to the communities in south philly high school where we saw in one day alone 15 asian students who had to be taken to the emergency room as a result of a persistent pattern of harassment. they didn't speak the king's english. my father spoke ricky ricardo english as

well and he would have been a victim of bullying under that circumstance. so we worked with the school district. we don't focus on the criminal prosecution of the specific bully. that's an important element and we work with our partners in local government on that, but our focus has been on the system's issues, of working with the school superintendents, working with the school districts to create a culture of inclusion, to create a culture where people can be accepted for who they are. we've seen bullying in the context of kids with disabilities, kids who couldn't get off the bus because they were getting beaten up on the bus. the bullying of kids who are lgbq, that's probably our biggest growth area. these are

kids who are being bullied because they are different. and in suburban minneapolis we saw quite literally over the course of a two year period, we saw 6 or 7 kids who took their own lives, six or 7. we can't get those lives back, tragickly, but we can redouble our efforts to be sure no one else has to bear the unspeakable. we see the bullying of latino kids, of african american kids, we see bullying in so many shapes and forms and i've seen it across the country. but i've always seen remarkable and couragous people at work, local law enforcement, local da's, people who are getting out of their lanes. the old paradigm of a da and a attorney and a police officer, you get bad guys, you put them this jail. you know, i'm telling you, i've done a lot of hate crimes cases and i know today's bullies are often tomorr simply wait

for that train wreck to occur and prosecute, that's going to be like trying to cure cancer by building more hospitals. we can't do it that way. we've got to get into prevention mode. we've got to figure out strategies to prevent, we've got to empower school districts, we've got to empower parents, we've got to empower bystanders. when my daughter was bullied in 7th grade, her friends saw it, but they were paralyzed. they didn't know what to do and they did nothing. i don't begrudge thipl for that, they are wonderful kids, but they didn't have the tools to do anything about it. so we work on those issues and we work on those and our local school district was remarkable in their reaction. but in the work that we have done, ruslyn and i across the country, we have seen too many school districts, quite frankly, that have been slow to respond. and that is why we have to come together like this. that is why we have to get out of our lane and

understand that we've got to make house calls. we've got to move beyond the traditional paradigm that i've a federal prosecutor, i wait for the phone to ring and i respond. that's not how melinda has responded, that's not how eric holder approach their job, that's certainly not how this superintendent is approaching his job and that's not how any of us can afford to approach their jobs. i don't want to prosecute any more hate crimes cases. i want to be, for those of you over 50, remember that maytag commercial, the guy is sitting there waiting for that phone to ring? i want to be that room. i want to have nothing to do. i want to take my niece up on her offer to golf at the present side owe because i want to have time on my hands. but we see this headwind of intolerance that is a growth industry, i real estate gret to tell you. we see it manifested

in our hate crimes practice, so many cases involving teenagers who have been recruited at a young age to desecrate mosques, to do so many other unspeakable things in communities across this country. so we have to get to work and we are, in fact, getting to work and i am so impressed at the partnerships that have been out here. i'm so impressed that we recognize that bullying is no longer simply the bullying of your fists but it's the bullying that can come through the use of twitter, through the use of other social media. we did a case, again a hate crimes case involving an individual who called himself devilfish who over the internet was sending death threats to the heads of the national council of irasa to other organizations that had the audacity to october on behalf

of immigrants. and we prosecuted him. you described one just now, that is not an isolated incident. you know that old addage, sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me, i categorically reject that. we have seen kids quite literally take their own lives as a result of cyber bullying and that is why i did a remarkable partnership in south florida with local law enforcement who had gone into schools talking about bullying, including cyber bullying and giving people concrete examples of things of situations they saw, it was remarkable. and that is why we will continue to do that work. so i hope today as we move forward you will understand that we are in this together with you at the department of justice. this is an all hands on deck enterprise. there is so much to do. i hope at the end of this day we will indeed all follow the lead of that

student, walk out and say what are one or two things i'm going to do differently and better? how are we going to improve this situation? i hope if you take one and only one thing from melinda and my and ruslyn's remarks today, if you have an idea, please bring them to us. we want to learn from you. we are in this together and i want to say thank you because the most important thing we have is a recognition that you understand that this is indeed a national issue for us to deal with. i'm looking forward to the rest of the day, i appreciate your presence and i appreciate your leadership, melinda, and let's get on with it. (applause).

>> i have the honor of sbre duesing our moderator, tom perez has graciously agreed to stay and participate in our first panel, business creating a healthy safe and inclusive environment for all school students, the role of our federal government. tom perez, assistant secretary for civil rights, ruslyn lee. she was also nominated by president obama to serve in her role as assistant secretary of education for civil rights and she was confirmed by the senate in may of 2009. as assistant secretary, ruslyn is assistant secretary arnie's duncan's primary advisor. before she joined the department of education she was vice president of the education trust in washington, dc and was

the founding executive of education trust west in oakland. in these positions she advocated for public school students in california, focusing on achievement and opportunity gaps, improving can urriculum and instructional quality and ensuring quality education for everybody. she served as an advisor on education issues on a number of private ipbs institutions, she is a teacher, a lawyer, and a very influential voice on all policy matters. she was also passionate about ending this issue of bullying and bringing everyone together to stop this disturbing trend so please welcome assistant secretary for civil rights, ruslyn lee. as i said, our moderator is not always our lieutenant governor, of course he needs to introduction -- no, i get to say something. i get to say something. as everyone in this room

knows, youngest mayor in 100 years, right? youngest mayor in 100 years when he was elected 10 years ago and he has remained an effective and visionary leader for everyone. mayor newsom gained worldwide recognition when he granted marriage licenses to same sex couples in 2004. we all remember those moving pictures of smiling couples on the steps of city hall, some of them their children watching on. his actions in 2004 thrust this civil rights issue into the national spotlight and cemented his reputation as a fearless public officials who does what he thinks is right. under mayor newsom's energetic leadership the economy grew and the city became an economic center for biotech and clean tech. gach newsom has been a trail blaitzer on combating

homelessness and protecting the government. in 2007 he was re-elected as mayor with more than 70 percent of the vote, which is unheard of. please welcome our lieutenant governor, gavin newsom. >> my role was to get tom to speak. i'm just going to jump in because i want to keep you all on time. you've got an agenda packet and i'm going to be held accountable if you don't meet it. roslyn, let's pick up on tom's passion. he told me a couple points that are important, that is the consciousness awareness, this growing consciousness around bullying. and it's a question i guess that requires, has bullying gotten worse or have we gotten better to begin to recognize it? >> hard to know. tom and the

president refer to as far too often as a rite of passage. we certainly are seeing evidence in ways that i don't recall, the levels of violence, the vitriolic violence, it's not just coming from the back of the school, it's coming at home, social media, you are inundated with it, the effects of it. we also certainly there's been an evolution of what we should tolerate. for me, for example, very early on in the administration i had the privilege of meeting with carl hoover walker's mother. he would have been 11 years old on the day that we were meeting. this was in the spring of 2009. and as she was leaving and she

was talking about his death and he was one of the earliest stories that we had heard about a young person who had taken his own life because he was a member of the lgbq community. and she said it me, you know, he died because he was gay and he didn't know he was gay. he was 10. how could he know he was gay? and it dawned on me at that moment and through the many months from there until the time the guidance was issued, when tom says the sort of our work in the growth industry around students that are members of the lgbq community for far too long, it was not just tolerance, it was also a true and sincere lack of understanding that school officials had anything to do with it because of course, as you all know, we don't have the kind of jurisdiction over the

lgbt community and their students as many perceived we had under title 6 for race color or title 9 for sex or 504, the ada for students with disabilities. but sex discrimination had been long since seen and recognized by the courts as also gender stereotyping. so carl might not have known that he was gay and he might not have been bullied and harassed because he was gay. perhaps it wasn't about his sexual orientation, it was about the fact he wasn't acting like a boy enough or girls aren't acting like a girl enough, in other words, it's gender stereotyping. that's a violation of title 9 and we made it clear, right? so that kind of training and recognition and help the superintendents and school officials so that what happened to seth walsh here in

tehachipe where for years he was subject to bullying and harassment makes the leaders in schools realize they have a responsibility and also gives them tools in ways they haven't known they had before to do something about it. it is also, though, not just about civil rights enforcement. when we talk about bullying and harassment there is no federal definition of bullying. in fact, one of the things we're working on is getting a common definition so we know what that means. and tom and i have an enormous amount of jurisdiction and team support to help ensure that when it comes to race, when it comes to color and national origin and sex and disability that there is some real teeth behind that, but it also is about students that are bullied and harassed because they are short, because they might act

differently or unique. that's where we have to provide the kinds of tools and supports and training to superintendents, like -- i see another one over there, tony smith from oakland, the sort of heroes that are deeply trying to transform their communities and recognize that this is also a community issue, that it is not just a school issue. >> tom, why don't we have a federal definition? >> well, we're working on it. i mean, i think there's a, when we had the white house conference there was a conversation about what is the federal role and there continues to be i think a robust debate in this country about whether education issues are local issues, whether they are federal issues, and what should be done. and there are a number of people --. >> tom, let me jump in. bullying is hardly unique to

school day. >> uh-huh. >> so why in the broadier sense is there not a federal definition of bullying that transcends local jurisdiction on schools? meaning, we know what bullying is when we see it. everyone may have a variation, about why isn't there a broad definition? >> certainly in the south philly case, a number of those kids were dealt with in the local criminal justice system because they committed an assault, a pretty serious assault. so that's -- bullying has a continuum. that's the extreme end of the continuum. but then you see what happens on twitter and facebook and the things that occur there and that becomes a lot more challenging to come up with a definition that is sufficiently

clear so that it can give guidance to local authorities and also respectful of constitutional first amendment issues of that nature. so it's a very good question to ask. it's a very challenging question to answer given the continuum of abuses that we see that we would put in the broad rubric of bullying. >> do you see, are there trend lines in terms of bullying? obviously cyber bullying and you talked about tweets, we have roughly 7.5 million people on facebook under the age of 13, there's no delete button for those images we post online. are you seeing those trend lines, are you seeing broader trend lines or are we just starting to measure these things because our consciousness is expanding with regard to bullying. >> that's another challenging question to answer. there are a lot of data gaps. i was a

local elected official and we worked very hard to get schools to collect data on incidents of violence in the school and, frankly, there's a lot of data integrity issues involved. you don't want to be the school that has the highest number of incidents in your district. and so there's a built-in perverse incentive to sweep things under the rug. and so part of the challenge moving forward and i have had many conversations with superintendents and law enforcement officials as well about how we can address this data integrity issue and how a school won't be hoisted by their own petard because they had the courage to collect the data when other schools kind of look the other way. so, again, it's a hard question to answer in ways that are other than anecdote. there have been survey data and things of that nature, but i feel uncomfortable saying unequivocally this is what