ED’s “Stop Bullying” website includes the following advice on preventing cyber bullying.

It’s not the kind of letter you would think the secretary of education would get, but Arne Duncan said he gets them all the time.

“I’m being bullied at school and on the bus, and I’m afraid of telling somebody because they might hear about it and do something bad to me,” a girl from Texas wrote in a letter to the Obama administration’s top education official.

“I don’t really like telling on somebody, but I’ve told the principal and [he] didn’t do anything about it. I’ve considered suicide but that won’t help anything; that will only hurt my family. Please give me advice about what to do.”

Such things are happening in schools across the country, Duncan said during a Sept. 21 summit on bullying prevention.

In the wake of the suicide of 14-year-old Jamey Rodemeyer of Amherst, N.Y., Duncan and other education experts said schools must confront the bullying problem head on, lest they risk more young lives.

“You have to take these tough issues on openly and honestly,” Duncan said in a brief interview with the Buffalo News during the conference. “It’s painful. It’s difficult work. It’s tough stuff. But ultimately it saves lives.”

What’s more, the Education Department (ED) can help school districts do just that.

“We work very directly with districts that want our help,” Duncan said. “We’ve had some pretty significant success with working with districts, working on preventing this and dealing with the aftermath of these devastating tragedies. If that is something the [Williamsville] district is interested in, we would love to be helpful.”

Duncan told a crowd of several hundred at the summit that the Obama administration had made bullying a priority. In addition to setting up an informational website, www.stopbullying.gov, the administration is also working on developing a uniform definition of bullying that aims to help schools confront the problem.

“Changing the culture and changing the climate is very important” to preventing bullying, said Jamie M. Ostrov, an associate professor of psychology at the University at Buffalo who is serving the panel that’s coming up with that uniform definition.

Rodemeyer was the victim of several hateful anonymous comments left on his Formspring blog. ED’s “Stop Bullying” website includes the following advice on preventing cyber bullying…

• Educate students, teachers, and other staff members about cyber bullying, its dangers, and what to do if someone is cyber bullied.

• Discuss cyber bullying with students. They might be knowledgeable about cyber bullying, and they might have good ideas about how to prevent and address it.