Plans must include
o Descriptions of and statements prohibiting bullying
o Clear procedures for school staff to report bullying or retaliation
o Provision for anonymous reports
o Clear procedures for promptly responding to and investigating reports of bullying or retaliation
o Range of disciplinary sanctions for perpetrators of bullying or retaliation
o Clear procedures to address the victim’s need for safety
o Strategies for protecting students who report bullying
o Procedures for notifying parents or guardians of both victims and perpetrators
o Procedures for reporting criminal activity to law enforcement
o Disciplinary provisions for knowingly false reports of bullying
o Strategies for counseling perpetrators and victims.
o Provision for ongoing professional development to build skills of all members of school staff
Regulations to be issued by 9/30/10 will flesh out the duty of school staff to report bullying incidents they witness or become aware of to school principals.
Annual notice of plan requirements must be given to students, parents, and school staff.
Principals are responsible for implementing plans.
Dept of Elementary and Secondary Education must develop a model plan and compile a list of available bullying prevention and intervention resources.
The harm to our son was permanent. The damage to our ability to trust the administration of our son’s school, the school committee, and our belief in their ability to keep our children safe was immense. We incurred $80,000 in debt because we transferred to a private school (daughter) and the cost to the town was several hundred thousand dollars in out of district placement for our son. If I had it to do over, we would have left public school for our children sooner because bullying was so rampant, dangerous, and out of control. Because our children were born prematurely and had motor and other delays, they were targeted victims and there was no where to run or hide except to leave that public school system.
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p>The examples I could describe from first hand knowledge are so extensive and disgusting that, frankly, I don’t want to relive them to post about them.
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p>My experience was that blame the victim, especially if that victim had “special needs” of any kind was alive and well in the 1990s in our town.
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p>If this law protects one child from that level of harm, and means one fewer child has a diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder due to bullies in school and cowardly adults, then this legislation is worthwhile.
Assault and assault and battery ARE criminal offenses. Stalking and harassment are, too. But the adult example of zero tolerance for such behaviors, well, might make kids more willing to let the adults in their life know…and to file charges.
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p>Everyone who is bullied IN school is also bullied and harassed OUT of school. Too true.
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p>The amended stalking and harassment law actually is relevant in this context, if used.
if it creates a “hostile environment” for the child at school. The legislature was specifically striking at the pervasive pattern of bullying that followed Phoebe Prince around throughout her daily life. The focus is on the victim’s subjective experience.
…is clearly within school jurisdiction, at least in the district I both attended and sub in. I hope that much of what you say above is correct, but we’ve also seen extreme reactions in the school security context following Columbine and similar instances in the name of “zero tolerance”. I hope we can avoid that in this context.
Deborah,
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p>My family also experienced a blame the victim (when the victim is a different kind of kid) culture at our school last year in a bullying situation. I’ve posted on BMG before my concerns that, in that context, this law could end up backfiring and putting victims at risk of being blamed, punished, criminalized and so on.
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p>The irony is that school staff too sometimes see kids with differences, including disability-based differences, as threatening, as bad kids. The human impulse that leads kids to victimize an odd kid, also leads grownups to stigmatize the kid for not being more socially adept, more charming, more likable.
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p>As the Globe front page noted today, there are legitimate concerns about the Odgren case fueling unfounded fears of kids with an Asperger’s label, or maybe any of the long list of labels Odgren had. If Odgren had been better protected from the bullying he experienced somewhere along the way, would these two families have been spared the devastation they face?
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p>Are you more confident than I am that the law will protect and not add to the problems of kids with special needs?
It’s the repeated acts of targeting that trigger the definiton of bullying. The target’s state of mind and the victim’s identity are not relevant. School staff will need to be trained to identify bullying and then must sort out who did what to whom. That’s the essence of enforcing any rule of conduct.
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p>I think having school staff better equipped and poised to recognize repeated acts of targeting will help deter bullying. I do not believe that school staff are going to automatically assume that the kid with disabilities is the aggressor.