County’s first-ever bullying report surveys students, finds high rates of bullying.

For a while, an older kid would follow sixth-grader Johnny Nguyen home from Los Padres Elementary School in Salinas. “He would chase me home and say he’d beat me up,” Nguyen says.

He and his friends told a teacher, who one day walked Nguyen home. “My teacher told him to stop, or he would tell his parents,” Nguyen says. The bullying stopped.

Nguyen is one of four students deeply involved in an anti-bullying pilot program at Los Padres, beginning in 2013. They’ve worked with Program Coordinator Frances Weesner of nonprofit Harmony at Home to write and perform skits showing what bullying is and how to stop it.

“It’s a part of growing up,” Weesner says. “Kids are trying to figure out who has the power and how to use it. It’s a pretty good high, if you get away with it.”

The program goal, through intensive workshops with every teacher and school staff member, is to reduce bullying.

The program is described in a draft report the county Mental Health Commission prepared for the Board of Supervisors, who will discuss it at a Jan. 29 meeting of the Mental Health Commission.

A copy of the draft, obtained by the Weekly, shows Monterey County doing slightly worse than California on average. Fourteen percent of local elementary school kids reported being victims of bullying, compared with 12 percent for the state. Twenty-one percent of local kids reported being bullies, compared with 15 percent for the state. Because the report is still in draft form, Health Department officials declined to comment.

According to the report, Carmel Unified School District had the worst average rates of bullying among middle – and high-school districts in Monterey County. Thirty-three percent of 7th graders and 25 percent of 11th graders reported being harassed by peers at least twice in the last year.

Monterey Peninsula Unified, North Monterey County Unified and Pacific Grove Unified tied for the second-most bullying among 7th, 9th and 11th graders.

CUSD Chief Student Services Officer Heath Rocha says those numbers don’t jibe with what students have been reporting to the California Healthy Kids Survey since 2007. “We’ve made huge strides,” he says. “To say we are the worst couldn’t be further from the truth.”

For 2012-13, CUSD students reported being victims of bullying at rates in line with state and county averages, according to Rocha’s data, and being beaten up at rates lower than the average. That’s proof, Rocha says, the district’s anti-bullying programs are working.