RATS AT YOUR CHILD'S SCHOOL

The nightly news anchor raised his voice in alarm and warned, "Our investigative reporter, Felicity Katz, has found rats running loose at Elderberry Elementary School."

Naturally, alarm bells went off and every mother in the county was demanding answers out of the much harassed school board.

"How can our children learn with rats running around?" demanded Kim Schee, mother of three.

She has a point.

But is she concentrating on the right rats at her child's school?

Studies will show that an occasional rat on the loose isn't really going to have an impact on a child's learning.

But there is a different kind of rat, a much bigger rat, running around loose in Elderberry and all the public and private schools in America.

It's a big rat in human form, male or female, which intimidates students both physically and psychologically. And these human bully rats are far more dangerous to your child's learning than a few furry, four-legged critters.

The human variety is capable of raising your child's normal stress hormone level six times. With a single instance of that stress level, your child will lose new brain cells in the part of the brain that governs learning, memory and emotion. Five or six high stress levels brought on by regular bullying and your child's brain is in for serious damage.

According to a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, young rats were placed in cages occupied by older, more aggressive rats. The resulting bullying raised the younger rats' stress levels six times and destroyed cells in their hippocampus region – the part of the brain that processes emotion, memory and learning.

This study is an early warning that you should be on the lookout for the big, humanoid rats in your child's school and not worry so much about the smaller four-legged ones.

The bully rats make look a lot cuter, but they are far more dangerous to your child.

In fact, one such bully rat may look exactly Kim Schee's daughter.

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