County Commissioner Jan Hall expressed a concern to her fellow county board members Tuesday, May 18, 2010, that was not necessarily in the purview of county government. She said she has been receiving calls from constituents who are concerned about bullying in the ISD166 school district. The problem has escalated into kids not wanting to go to school and getting stomachaches because they are worried. Parents are concerned, Hall said.
Hall said she has not been able to get satisfactory information on the issue locally and would like to see more done to address it. She thought it would be helpful if the school brought in a professional to work with students in classrooms and to help them understand how serious the problem has become across the nation. She was aware that the school had sponsored some workshops on bullying but wanted to see more interactive intervention.
Commissioner Jim Johnson said that when he was a teacher, he received a lot of training on bullying and dealing with conflict in the classroom. “I think there’s education out there,” he said. “Is it enough?”
Commissioner Hall said she knows of a family who took their kids out of public school and enrolled them in an online school because they weren’t seeing any resolution to bullying taking place in ISD 166. Commissioner Fritz Sobanja said he knows of two other students—not the ones Hall was talking about— doing the same thing. He expressed concern that problems such as these are becoming more frequent.
The school is not blind to the problem, Commissioner Bruce Martinson said, but he wondered if the interventions that have been done are enough.
Hall and Sobanja talked about trying to fit the May 19 school board meeting into their schedules, but neither of them attended that meeting. They may bring the topic up at a quarterly county, school, tribal, and city meeting to be held in Grand Portage May 27.
One of Hall’s theories was that young people featured on popular reality TV shows are modeling very destructive interpersonal behavior.
In a subsequent phone interview, ISD 166 Superintendent Beth Schwarz said, “I do believe we are having some bullying issues. There’s going to have to be a cultural change. We are
doing something about it.”
Schwarz said she thinks most of the bullying behavior is going on in the middle school. This year, she surveyed middle school students and found that some do have anxieties about being bullied at school and want to stay home from school sometimes because of it.
A lot of the bullying happens in hallways, bathrooms (which have no surveillance cameras), and off school grounds, Schwarz said. One of the more perplexing challenges, she said, is to figure out what to do when one student says it’s happening and another says it isn’t. She thought the school could improve in its response to students who report bullying behavior.
Schwarz is considering approaching the issue from several angles: by providing more teacher training on the issue, educating the administration, and revising the discipline policy.
Schwarz gave an example in which a student impulsively jostles another student and causes his books to fall to the floor. Thestudent whose books are on the floor might perceive the action to have been more offensive than the offending student thought it would be.
According to a website sponsored by The Nemours Foundation, kidshealth. org/teen/your_mind/problems/ bullies.html, “Bullying is when a person is picked on over and over again by an individual or group with more power, either in terms of physical strength or social standing.”
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has a website on bullying: www.stopbullyingnow.hrsa.gov/ kids/what-is-bullying.aspx. According to the website, “Bullying happens when someone hurts or scares another person on purpose and the person being bullied has a hard time defending himself or herself. Usually, bullying happens over and over.” Examples include punching, shoving, and other acts that hurt people physically; spreading bad rumors about people; keeping certain people out of a group; teasing people in a mean way; and getting certain people to gang up on others.
“Bullying also can happen online or electronically,” the Department of Health and Human Services goes on to say. “Cyber bullying is when children or teens bully each other using the Internet, mobile phones or other cyber technology.”
Superintendent Schwarz hopes adults can help spread the message that bullying is not acceptable. The Department of Health and Human Services cites research indicating that 15-25% of U.S. students are bullied with some frequency and 15-20% report that they bully others with some frequency.
“As many as 160,000 students may stay home on any given day because they are afraid of being bullied,” the website states. “Children who bully are more likely to get into fights, vandalize property, and drop out of school. And 60% of boys who were bullies in middle school had at least one criminal conviction by the age of 24.”
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