Pencil in 7 p.m. Wednesday night in the lecture hall at Greenville High School if you want to learn how to discourage put-downs at home and in the classroom.

Anti-bullying specialist Dennis R. Barger of Grove City will be the guest speaker at a day-long event sponsored by Hempfield and East Elementary schools and paid for by a grant from the Communities That Care Coalition.

"He's been in the school district a couple of times in the past two years and he was very well received," said Hempfield Elementary School PTO president Sue Travaglini.

The independent consultant and former teacher works with students and teachers across the county and considers his program "preventative-based."

"Intervention is not real successful. The real key is prevention. Once students reach the point of needing drug and alcohol rehab, removal from the school or jail time, by then it's an uphill battle," said Barger, a retired sixth-grade teacher from Karnes City School district. "Its either take care of me now, or take care of me later."

He works with students and teachers to come up with anti-bullying programs and peer mediation groups to help eliminate put downs.

"Seventy percent of the students' problems come from put-downs," said Barger. Addressing those put-downs is part of Barger's consulting work.

"There's not one single way it works, but I'm telling you, it does work," he said of the program.

According to Mrs. Travaglini, that's exactly why he has been invited back to the school district, to work with teachers and students and to speak in the evening to parents, students and teachers.

"The guidance councilors and the school district is really supportive of anything that can help the kids," she said. "By also offering the presentation in the evening, it becomes more than kids bringing it home. It's the parents hearing it themselves. This way everyone works together."

Barger will address how some students are dealing with bullying and put-downs in the home between siblings, and help parents communicate with their children, before a crisis occurs.

Barger encourages everyone to work together. He uses a story about a starfish stranded on a beach to describe his method. In the story a man throws the stranded starfish back in the water, and is asked why he bothered with that one starfish, since there are tons of starfish stranded on miles and miles of beach.

"It makes a difference to this one," the story goes. "It's reaching out one at a time to help kids one at a time," explained Barger.