By Michael Alison Chandler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 10, 2006

Counselor Amy Dunne gets a knock on her office door at Park Lawn Elementary School in Alexandria several times a day. She greets a pair of girls coming in on Important Business. They have Issues. They need Privacy, Please.

She surrenders her room, with its cozy couch, to the ponytailed pre-adolescents, and their dramas unfold: How could you pretend you didn't see me in the hallway? Or: Why did you invite Celia to your slumber party and not me? There's the inevitable "That hurt my feelings" and the occasional "I'm sorry." On a good day, they leave the room Best Friends Forever. Again.

Many of the girls are graduates of "Chicks and Cliques," a course Dunne designed to curb the gossiping, rumor-spreading and snubbing that's endemic to girls. She helps them figure out how to talk through their problems, then she lets them borrow her office to use their new skills.

"Girls can be really mean to each other," said Dunne, who has counseled countless tearful tweens. "There's constant competition between who's better, prettier, who has more stuff."

In the affluent McLean elementary school where she used to work, girls judged one another on whether they had a new Louis Vuitton bag. At Park Lawn, the cool girls wear Converse Chuck Taylor high-tops.

"We think kids only have these issues when they are in middle school, but that's when they really blow up," said Dunne. "It's important to teach them to stand up for themselves and to handle the situations now."

Research has found that girls as young as 4 give each other the silent treatment. "When you are 5, you say, 'I don't want to be your friend anymore,' and you poke someone," said Rosalind Wiseman of the District, author of the best-selling "Queen Bees and Wannabes," a parents' guide to understanding their daughters' friendships and social hierarchies.

Chicks and Cliques runs daily during the two-week break between sessions at the year-round school. It generated so much interest that Dunne designed a course for boys.

Dunne teaches the 10- and 11-year-olds how to choose good friends (ideally, girls their own age and those who are more into Nancy Drew and less into drugs and alcohol), how to roll with it when their best friend saves a place for someone else in line, and how to think critically about what popularity means.

In her most recent class, in January, student Cynthia Mendez wrote that there were two kinds of popular girls at school.

One "makes you [feel] good about yourself," she penciled onto the lined pages of her notebook, covered in hand-colored flowers. The other "makes you feel small, unimportant and desperate. She uses her mean power to hurt others."

At Cynthia's age, it's not just the most popular girls who can inflict pain, but all the fickle friends who claim new allegiances every day or withhold prized cafeteria seats from certain pals.

In one exercise, Dunne asked her students to plot the history of one of their friendships on a timeline, with all its ups and downs.

"I met Cynthia on the bus at the beginning of the year," said Harold Mongoue, as she described her timeline to the class. "But then a few weeks later, it went down, because she wasn't speaking to me, and she was spending time with other friends. Then we talked again and it went up."

Dunne tells her students that "friendships don't end." Even on the days they feel ignored or excluded, their old buddies usually come back around. So instead of writing them off, she encouraged them to think of ways to combat their dejected feelings -- eat popcorn or take a bath.

When Dunne came up with the idea for the class in January 2003, she was working at Spring Hill Elementary School in McLean. She said parents were coming to her with concerns about their children's behavior: "My daughter's so mean; what can I do?" or, sometimes, "My daughter's getting bullied; what can I do?"

She started a seminar series for the parents, which included a presentation by Wiseman. For the girls, she began her first class on friendship. The principal incorporated the class into the standard curriculum for fifth-grade girls.

The early version of her class was geared toward counteracting the different types of bullying that she found. Girls were more likely to judge one another based on how they dressed or whether they had been invited to go on vacation with certain girls' families.

Online bullying was big in McLean, she said. Girls would learn each other's passwords, then send nasty massages in other people's names.

At Park Lawn, where she took a job two years ago, most of her students had never heard of Instant Messenger, and the bullying was more traditional name-calling and ignoring.

Here, 62 percent of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches and nearly half speak a language other than English at home. Recently, Dunne asked her students to write down the things that trouble them at home, and they filled a board with anxieties written on pink and purple sticky notes: "gun shoots," "my mom in the bill trouble," "my life . . . what will happen?"

Dunne said she teaches that good friends are people who can be good listeners, who can lend a shoulder in times of trouble. She said she watched the girls become closer after their long group discussions. They went from sitting in twos or threes in class to tumbling out the door at recess to play basketball and skip rope together.

Fourth-grader Maryama Hussein took the class lessons to heart. "A true friend cares about you, is there for you," she said. Her best friend moved all the way to Manassas last year, but she learned that when you find a true friend, it's important to hold on to her.