Wyatt Boyd stands helplessly plastered against a brick wall outside Athens Middle School while the class muscle – who stands a foot taller and wider – relieves him of his lunch money.

“Fork it over,” says Humberto Bahena.

“Yeah,” adds his sidekick, Keith Bridges.

Same drill, different day.

Wyatt doesn’t bother to tell a teacher about the holdup. He’s used to it. He rarely gets roughed up. And he fears retaliation.

Inside the school, Allie Dye walks into the girl’s restroom with dread. The popular girls who routinely loiter there over lunch are making her life miserable. They talk about her aloud as she enters the stall and continue the verbal barrage as she washes her hands at the sink.

“Freak!” says one girl.

“She’s so weird,” says another, as two more join in the teasing.

Allie wonders what she’s done to incur their daily wrath.

The experiences of Wyatt and Allie aren’t real. They are two of the dramatizations that students in Sherry McEwen’s seventh-grade talented and gifted civics class at AMS have included on their CD titled “Bullying: How to Stop It Now.”

The students’ bullying project began as a discussion in civics class and blossomed into an anti-bullying CD in the making, plans for a brochure and an anti-bullying T-shirt, presentations to the Athens Board of Education and Athens City Council, a promise to share their CD with other city and county schools and, most importantly, a decrease in bullying incidents at the middle school.

“They have taken this project and gone with it,” McEwen said. “The students brainstormed and came up with a list of news events and we narrowed it to those that were doable.”

The students chose the MySpace suicide. It is a true story about a 13-year-old Missouri girl named Megan Meier who struck up a friendship with "Josh" on the on-line social network called MySpace in September 2006. About a month later, on Oct. 15, “Josh” dropped Megan, saying he had heard she was a bad person. The next day, Megan told her mother, Tina, that messages were being posted saying: “Megan Meier is a slut” and “Megan Meier is fat.”

That night, on Oct. 16, 2006, her parents found her dead in her room. She had hanged herself. Her father, Ron, said he found a message the next day from "Josh," telling her she was a bad person and the world would be better without her. The parents learned about six weeks later that the boy was not real and that an adult neighbor had pretended to be “Josh.” The parents wanted the mother to be prosecuted, but there was no law against what has become known as cyber-bullying.

On the CD, which the students are working on with the help of computer guru Todd Walton, students perform skits to identify various types of bullying – ranging from alienation and humiliation to physical assault. Not only did the TAG students get involved, but the topic was so meaningful to students at the school, McEwen allowed any student who wanted to participate to do so.