We’re not gonna take it: Breaking the cycle of bullying
By:
Marsha Boutelle
In the coastal community of Oxnard, surrounded by his classmates and teacher, Brandon McInerney, 14, rises from his desk, draws a gun and kills 15-year-old Lawrence King, an openly gay boy.
In the mountain town of Acton, about 80 miles northeast of Oxnard, Jeremiah Lasater, 14, fatally shoots himself in the boys bathroom at his high school. The 6-foot-6-inch, nearly 300-pound freshman football player had been taunted about his size throughout his school years. “It was constant,” a former teacher says of Jeremiah’s plight. “It was a daily verbal assault.”
In New York City, 12-year-old Maria Herrera hangs herself in a closet at home after what her mother described as relentless school bullying. “They used to beat her up; they used to harass her, curse at her, call her ‘train tracks’ because she had braces; they used to cut her hair,” according to the girl’s mother.
The common denominator in these tragic deaths: bullies.
True, not all tormented children commit suicide. But tens of thousands suffer every day as the result of a classmate’s verbal, physical or electronic abuse. Student bullying is one of the most frequently reported discipline problems in K–12 education: 21 percent of elementary schools, 43 percent of middle schools and 22 percent of high schools reported such harassment nationwide in 2005–06, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
“Numbers about bullying are consistent not just across the United States but [across] the world,” says Scott Modell, a professor at California State University, Sacramento, and director of Project SAFE, the Safe and Accepting for Everyone plan adopted by Fresno Unified School District this year. “The numbers are not increasing, just as they are not decreasing. We are, however, becoming more aware of the issue and the need to combat it.”
The California Education Code has long had a number of sections that address school violence, including student bullying. And on Jan. 1 of this year, Assembly Bill 86 became law and added “teeth,” as one superintendent puts it, to the Ed Code by giving schools a legal right to punish bullies through suspension or even expulsion—punishment many had meted out in the past, law or no law. The new regulation also recognizes the rise of cyberbullying and bans this new twist on earlier intimidation techniques. Cyberbullying takes place via nasty messages on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, on cell phones and in text messages.
A research perspective
The notion that bullying is a childhood rite of passage is disputed by educators and psychologists.
“That idea is a misconception and a common belief that is so hurtful to victims of bullying,” says Jaana Juvonen, a professor of developmental psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. The Swedish academician Dan Olweus is the father of bullying research, according to Juvonen. “He defines it as an imbalance of power, intentionally caused. The perpetrators usually say, ‘Well, I didn’t mean to.’ But we need to listen to the victims. They are usually kids who are suffering in silence and who do not retaliate or tell anyone about it.”
The issue is widespread and not easily resolved. Close to one-fourth of California students are involved in bullying, either as bullies, victims or both, Juvonen says. It can be confusing for teachers and administrators in school districts and county offices of education to decide what to do about the problem; there are different schools of thought and programs to choose from.
From her years as a researcher, Juvonen offers the following advice.
“The biggest problem schools have trying to address bullying is that they focus on individual students when they really need to focus on groups,” she says. “At any one time, 70 percent of kids are acting as bystanders [during a bullying event]. They may hear about it or see something happening, and yet they don’t respond. But if kids intervene, the bullying stops right away. Peer power is significant and can be the resolution to the problem. … The important thing to do is to change the peer culture of the school.”
Juvonen adds that schools need to be very selective when choosing a program to fight bullying.
“Unless people in positions of power really understand what the biggest challenges are,” she says, “we may be wasting a lot of money. We want to adopt a program that not only sounds right but where there is some sound research that supports that it actually can work.
“No. 1: Show me the program evaluations. I’m not so picky about who does them as to how they are done. There should be hard-core data, not anecdotal information. No. 2: What are the premises of the program? Why and how is it supposed to work? Does it involve bystanders? Bystanders are the key to changing the culture.”
Change the culture, stop the bully
The Safe School Ambassadors program exists as a sort of testament to Juvonen’s ideas, even though she is not affiliated with it.
SSA was developed by Rick Phillips, executive director of Santa Rosa-based Community Matters, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to promote positive youth development. In its nine years of existence, SSA is said to have changed cultures for the better in 800 K–12 schools across 26 states.
Phillips spent a considerable amount of time observing the effects of school bullying.
“During almost 20 years of being in the trenches as a teacher and principal, I frequently witnessed how kids can be mean to each other,” Phillips says. “The effect is traumatic: Who can thrive [at school] when you’re distracted by anxiety, fear or anger?
“What I also noticed was that most kids, when they saw [students being bullied], didn’t speak up or intervene. It seemed to me such a vitally important part in a democracy for citizens—young and old—to speak up for each other. I wanted to do something to mobilize young people’s courage to speak up.”
Phillips defines four tenets of the SSA program:
Students see, hear and know things that adults don’t.
- Students can intervene in ways adults can’t.
- Students are often on the scene of an incident before an adult knows about it.
- While adults make school rules, young people make the rules about whether or not it is “cool” to speak up for someone else who is being bullied.
At the 2008 CSBA Annual Education Conference and Trade Show in San Diego, Phillips co-presented a workshop on reducing bullying and violence in schools with Greg Lee, the diversity coordinator at the William S. Hart Union High School District in Santa Clarita. The Hart District Diversity Initiative Program won a CSBA Golden Bell award last year in the School Safety category (see related story on page 13).
Hart has been tracking bias-motivated incidents since 2006. Officials in the grade 7–12 district have been noting trends in bullying by gender, grade and ethnic group, and even at certain times of year.
“We have not experienced an increase in bullying; rather, we have seen a significant decrease based on cultural, racial, religious or gender-orientation motivations,” says Lee.
“The Safe School Ambassadors program has played a pivotal role in reducing the number of bullying incidents . SSA trains students over two full days to recognize and intervene in various forms of bullying, including exclusion, put-downs, intimidation, physical contact and acts against the campus such as vandalism and graffiti.
“The beauty of the program is that the vast majority of interventions performed by ambassadors go largely unnoticed by staff and most other students,” Lee adds. “But sometimes the interventions are spectacular. At one of our schools, in its first few weeks of operation, ambassadors disbanded a suicide pact.”
It’s hard to argue with that kind of success. But what about the safety of students who intervene on someone else’s behalf? Aren’t they putting themselves in danger?
Phillips says no.
“In nine years and over 40,000 kids we’ve trained, there has never been a problem for them to intervene with people they already know,” he says. “That’s where you’re going to be safe and effective. The premise is that we create ambassadors within the different cliques at the school. In each clique, we have one or two people who are in the ‘leadership’ position already. Over time—not overnight—we begin to see positive change.
“But we don’t profess to be ‘it,’ ” Phillips
adds. “We are one of many efforts to help and empower kids.”
The ‘whole-school’ approach
Project SAFE’s Modell is also an advocate for changing school culture—but with a twist.
“Changing a campus culture is complex,” Modell says. “We focus on the whole-school approach, which requires all stakeholders—students, teachers, administrators, parents, community members—to be involved in the process and to assist in creating and maintaining a culture that does not condone bullying, sexual harassment or molestation. [We do this] by increasing awareness of the issues, teaching empathy, building skills to confront and change, and ultimately empowering all to actively prevent and reduce these issues. Examples of this process may include changes in policies, specific teacher training, development of classroom activities for students, an increase in supervision, and informing and involving parents.”
Project SAFE’s methodology and results will be closely monitored by educators statewide and the media as it works over the next five years to create a lasting and effective anti-bullying program at Fresno Unified. The district is the fourth-largest in the state, with nearly 74,000 students and 106 campuses.
Fresno Superintendent Michael Hanson and the school board “wanted to create a broader definition of bullying, to include students with disabilities and anti-molestation” protections, Hanson says. “The reality is, in any environment—in today’s world—any of these things are possible. What was characteristic for us in the past were these programmatic responses to bullying that were episodic and dependent upon individual leaders or staff members. We wanted to [create a program to] make certain that we have great consistency, clear expectations and great training in place everywhere.”
Hanson and the Fresno school board members solicited proposals to determine who would tackle the job of developing such a comprehensive campaign. They decided on Modell and his Project SAFE team, he says, because, “We determined that they were by far and away the ones who could help us. We wanted something new and distinct.”
Hanson said neither he nor the board ran into objections to the $1.3 million price tag for the project from parents or the community.
“I think I’ve seen maybe one letter to the editor about it being a lot of money,” Hanson says. “This is the sixth-biggest city in the state, with the potential for violence and criminal behavior. … Frankly, the plan is being embraced.”
In March, Modell and his team begin collecting data on students, teachers, administrators, parents, transportation staff and other school employees. The assessment’s goal is to begin to understand the scope of the problems and needs of the district.
“The uniqueness of Project SAFE is that it simultaneously addresses multiple forms of violence and is comprehensive in its approach to school safety,” Modell says. “It addresses bullying, sexual harassment and molestation of both students with and without disabilities. The efficacy of the project is dependent upon the involvement of key stakeholders, including students, staff, administrators, parents and community members. The involvement of key stakeholders will assist with the integration of policy change, curriculum development and program implementation across the district.
The ultimate goal of Project SAFE is to facilitate a sustainable, long-term solution to school violence.”
Hanson says that he and the Fresno Unified board determined early on that only a comprehensive, systematic plan such as Project SAFE could address issues of bullying and violence in the district and ultimately transform its approach to resolving these challenging issues.
“It was kind of that old descriptor that, as school districts, we’re at a crossroads of interactions between homes and what kids learn on the street, while, at the same time, we’re trying to teach our kids. Teaching is our primary function, and this problem needs to be addressed if we are going to do our primary function well.
“This plan is the right thing to do. As a superintendent, it just became a compelling action for me to take, because it’s the right thing to do.”
Marsha Boutelle (mboutelle@csba.org) is a staff writer for California Schools.
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