Recent reports of bullying brought up painful memories for our family. Our son was the target of bullying at his middle school. Darker-skinned and smaller than most of his peers, he endured daily racial slurs, constant humiliation, and physical assaults. We did everything that experts recommend, and it still wasn’t enough.
We encouraged him to ignore the comments and talk to his teachers. When that failed, we instructed him to defend himself, which brought on more harassment from more students.
At first, he received support from his teachers, who admitted these students were known for this conduct. When we reported to administrators, they seemed resigned to it. Despite policies prohibiting bullying, we heard every excuse about why our son needed to ignore, get used to, or be understanding of the students tormenting him. When we talked to the parents, they downplayed or could not believe their children would do anything wrong. Neither they nor local law enforcement had been informed by the school of any misconduct.
When the harassment extended to the Internet and vandalism to our home, we withdrew both of our sons from the district and filed a complaint with the Ohio Department of Education. The district refused to respond, and the ODE claimed it couldn’t require them to.
Having exhausted all options, we filed a lawsuit against the district (Waters vs. Perkins School District) and had no choice but to move to another town.
What did we learn through all of this? First, many school policies are not worth the paper upon which they are printed. Zero-tolerance polices sound good, but unless they are followed as a way to end harassment, they don’t protect students. They protect schools from liability.
Second, Ohio law gives qualified immunity to administrators, even when they have acted, at best, as apathetic leaders or, at worst, as incompetent student managers.
Third, document disposal policies, authored by the Ohio School Boards Association as record-retention programs, make it nearly impossible to hold schools and administrators responsible when they don’t follow their own policies and jeopardize student safety.
Fourth, privacy laws, due process, and legal guarantees to free public education provide protection to aggressive students, but little is legally available to protect targeted students.
Fifth, schools are required to respond to bullying, but they are not required to end ongoing bullying and create an environment free from harassment.
What must change? Distinctions must be made between prevention and intervention programs. Some school prevention programs that just inspire students to treat each other better, amount to preaching to the choir. Schools need bullying intervention programs with counseling, clear codes of conduct, and progressive disciplinary programs requiring all students to follow the rules or risk removal from sports and extra-curricular actives or even risk expulsion.
These programs impact school culture by identifying what behaviors or slurs are no longer tolerated.
Students who report bullying must not be penalized. That means schools ought to stop suggesting that targeted students be escorted to their classes, open enroll elsewhere, receive online instruction, etc. This stigmatizes them and sends the message they’re the problem.
Instead, if the aggressors can’t control themselves, they should be more closely supervised, or recommended for instruction outside the building.
Ohio’s constitution, allowing for local control of districts, makes following the ODE’s intervention strategies on bullying completely optional. There are no penalties when a district does not adopt or follow the ODE’s recommendations, does not report incidents to both sets of parents, does not report incidents of bullying back to the state, or does not permanently publish them on their websites. There should be.
Since bullying looks more like harassment, stalking, and assault than conflict or simply being mean, it’s time to treat it like the crime against children it is. Educators ought to hand over suspicions of bullying to law enforcement, and there should be sanctions against districts that don’t comply or cooperate with investigations. This would allow for trained investigators, not untrained administrators, to interview parents, students, teachers, and other witnesses, review other evidence, and inspect social media posts.
Administrators and parents of aggressive students ought to view these children who delight in harassing their peers as displaying early indicators of deviance, not participating in a rite of passage. Self-serving denials by these students should be viewed as that.
If you are informed that a child has been bullying his peers, resist the urge to join his denials. Get him help to correct his behavior and make amends.
Finally, if school personnel and/or parents are stonewalling your complaints about bullying, contact the police yourself with documentation. Parents need to know how to take screen shots of texts, social media posts, etc. Individual and isolated incidents of bullying are not likely to disappear, but when schools follow their own policies and consider it the job of all adults to end bullying, then progress is likely to be made.
Linda Waters is a licensed professional clinical counselor from Marblehead, Ohio.
First Published August 5, 2017, 4:00 a.m.
