With school leaders waging a multi-pronged anti-bullying campaign this year, students are questioning whether BHS actually has a bullying problem, and if so, whether the new measures are the solution.In interviews with dozens of students from all grades, the majority said that bullying has not been a major issue since middle school. Some said bullying takes place but it tends to be concentrated on social networking websites such as Facebook, where even the newly beefed-up school policy can’t protect students.
“It’s mainly online,” senior Jessica Giannelli said.
“That’s what bullying comes down to these days,” senior Shanica Gregory-Cox agreed.
The new anti-bullying policy “has a lot more teeth,” administrator Mr. Sullivan said, with obligations for deeper reporting and investigating of abuse, and punishments even for bystanders. But even with its new teeth, the policy can’t bite down on activity that takes place outside the school walls, including online.
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Some students found posters like these heartening while others questioned their worth. |
What happens here, at BHS, is not like the days of middle school, when name-calling was a constant and lunch trays were knocked from the hands of innocent, perhaps frail-looking students. But this doesn’t mean that at the high school everyone is feeling welcome.
A November survey of more than 500 students by Ms. Scanlon’s Leadership and Social Change class showed 15 percent – or 3 students in a class of 20 – don’t feel like they belong at BHS.
A survey of nearly 50 faculty members found no teachers who strongly agreed with the statement “Every student at BHS feels like he or she belongs here.” A full 65 percent said they did not think every student felt a sense of belonging. More than 90 percent of teachers said they had heard a student tease or ridicule another student.
Shanica remembers standing at the buses one day, overcome by the loud teasing and rude comments she heard being made to a special-needs student. Every time the student went to say something, the other kids would say, “Shut up. We don’t care.” Shanica was disturbed by the cruelty. “It’s just who he is,” she said of the boy, “he can’t help it.”
These kinds of incidents are exactly what the new policy aims to prevent. The assemblies, surveys and posters that students have noticed this year follow a state bullying prevention law passed last spring in the wake of the suicides of South Hadley 15-year-old Phoebe Prince and 11-year-old Carl Walker-Hoover of Springfield. At BHS, every time an incident is reported, admin-istrators are required to fill out a new “Bullying Prevention and Intervention Incident Reporting” form, in case there is a pattern of bullying that needs to be acted upon.
The staff is hoping that if students see bullying, they will feel comfortable enough to report it, even if the person being bullied is too afraid to.
A survey suggests that may be wishful thinking.
During a school assembly in October, school psychologist Ms. Hayes asked 250 juniors and seniors if they would step in to defend a victim of social bullying. The results were almost evenly split: Only 37 percent said they would stand up for the target; 31 percent said they weren’t sure if they would, and 32 percent said it would be too hard to say something.
“They will not speak-out,” Shanica reported on her fellow-classmates. However, she assures if these incidents are not noticed now, “you’ll see it when it gets worse and worse.One tactic being used to encourage students to stand up against bullying has been a flood of posters highlighting the message “Bullying is NOT okay,” and asking students to question their own possible bullying behavior.
The posters made freshman Clarisol Baez feel good. As she said, “people are doing things to help other people.”
Junior Melanie Canales said she didn’t think the statistics on the posters applied to everyone, but at least they raised awareness.
Freshman Jessica Morgan said students paid no attention to the posters, and Giannelli said she’d heard about people pulling them down.
Perhaps the bleakest assessment came from Kayla Hernandez, who saw the posters as a sign of bullying’s permanence. “They’re just a reminder that it’s never going to stop,” the freshman said.
Most bullying these days has migrated online, students said. Eighty-eight percent of students in Leadership and Social Change said they had seen mean com-ments posted online. Peggy Perna recalled being harassed in the summer between her freshman and sophomore year, through rude comments and Facebook messages. “I couldn’t post anything without her making a comment on it,” Perna said about her cyber-bully. Last summer Perna wrote a comment on her ex-boy-friend’s Facebook wall, and three days later, she signed on to find a slew of new notifi-cations, her cyber-bully’s name attached. “She wasn’t even involved in the conver-sation in any way,” Perna frowned.
It’s easy for Perna to flash back to the vulner-ability she felt at the time, not knowing when the harassment would end or what she could do about it. Thankfully for Perna, it simply stopped one day as suddenly as it had started, as if the bully lost her taste for outright curtness. However, not everyone is as fortunate.
The “honesty box” on Facebook, and the website Form-spring, are useful cyber-tools for bullies who prefer the anony-mous threat. On either site, Giannelli said, “it’s basically a place where you can trash on anyone, and they’ll have no idea who you are.”
One of the problems with cyber-bullying is that fewer adults know how to deal with it because they grew up with regular bullying, and there are no physical signs such as bruises or black-eyes.
The effects of bullying can last long after high school. A story in the Boston Globe, a couple months ago, reported on adults in their thirties and forties who still carried emotional scars. As the reporter, Jenna Russell wrote, “the ham-mering insults of bullies act like fingers jabbed in the still-hardening clay of identity.”
Several students interviewed for this story described run-ins with bullying in middle school that still affect them years later. They remem-bered being choked on the bus, or having their books kicked around. Kelly Spinali was teased for having a crush on a boy-celebrity and said it shaped the way she sees the world and the people around her.
“It can make you stronger or completely break you down,” Spinali said.
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