When Avril shared this news with her second-grade class, her classmates decided to give her some of their memories. With the help of teacher Lizbeth Holley and parent volunteer Laura Beth DeHority, they assembled a scrapbook of their own baby pictures and presented it to Avril on June 7.

"They wrote things next to their photos like, 'I hope this helps you remember when you were in a car seat,' " DeHority says. "In the center of the book is pictures from the school year."

Avril's classmates were inspired to create the scrapbook by a book DeHority was reading to them, Wilfred Gordon Partridge McDonald, the story of a boy who shares his memories with an elderly man who has lost his own memories.

DeHority regularly reads to Holley's second-graders as a volunteer for the Asset Building Champion Parents program, known as ABC Parents. Another Willow Glen Elementary parent, Felecia Mulvany, developed the program last September as an outgrowth of Project Cornerstone, a collaboration of more than 75 organizations whose goal is to build a web of support around children and teens in Santa Clara County.

ABC Parents receive training from Project Cornerstone before volunteering in a classroom, where they visit once a week to read books that focus on friendship, peer relationships, conflict resolution and bullying. Volunteers encourage students to share their personal experiences.

Both Mulvany's and DeHority's sons have experienced bullying, but from opposite sides of the equation.

"I came up with the idea of doing lessons in my son's class last year," Mulvany says. "It was the beginning of Kevin's first-grade year, and he stood up to a third-grade bully who kept taking the soccer ball from his classmates and kicking it over the fence. The bully punched Kevin in the face and would have gotten away with it if Kevin hadn't told me about it."

DeHority initially saw her involvement in ABC Parents as a way to help her son Charlie, a student in Holley's class, curb his own bullying behaviors.

"A bully misreads social situations and often has low self-esteem," DeHority says. "It became important to me that I show Charlie I'm a leader in putting down bullying. It seemed the best defense to have him perceive me as a role model, and it's worked."

The lessons Charlie has learned through ABC Parents have allowed him to step back and see his behavior from the victim's perspective, his mother says. He's joined Peacebuilders, a group of students that helps mediate playground conflicts.

DeHority says volunteering with the program has other benefits as well.

"A lot of kids will come up to Felecia and me if they have something to talk about because they know we're ABC Parents," she says.

DeHority is one of three ABC Parents at Willow Glen Elementary. A total of 41 parents volunteer for the program at 15 schools. Parents in the program attend monthly training meetings to receive lesson plans to accompany the books they read to kindergarten through fifth-grade students. The lessons are appropriate for students at each grade level, though DeHority says she sometimes finds it challenging to get the point across to second-graders.

For more information about ABC Parents, contact Project Cornerstone at 408.351.6482 or visit www.projectcornerstone.org.