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 divis
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 becau
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 becau
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 un
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 an