BULLYING VIDEO AND CHMS STATISTICS

This week I had a discussion with one of my teachers (alias, Mr. Smith) who also teaches at a local university about the perception that his college students had regarding bullying and harassment issues. Mr. Smith told me that one of his college students had completed a presentation which included scenes from the recent movie Bullying. His college students had the perception that the behaviors in the movie are commonplace in all schools. The following is a clip from the movie. When I watched this video, I was distressed by what these children have encountered. At CHMS, I do not want any child to feel that no one cares for that child and that the child has no friends, nor that he or she doesn’t have anyone to turn to in times of crises. Mr. Smith and I discussed what we encounter regarding bullying at CHMS. Mr. Smith wanted to provide a realistic picture to his college students about what we see at our middle school. He wanted true data of what we have seen this year regarding bullying to use in his college class. I discussed with Mr. Smith about the Shelby County Board of Education’s Policy regarding bullying. The following information is from the Code of Conduct: “Passed by the state of Alabama Legislature, House Bill 216 became effective July 1, 2010. As a result, public school districts in Alabama are now required to establish school board policy to address and prevent harassment, violence, threats to do violence, and intimidation in the school environment. Subsequently, the Shelby County Board of Education recently adopted its own anti-harassment policy which strictly prohibits this behavior. Harassment is defined as a continuous pattern of intentional behavior, and includes (but is not limited to) written, electronic, verbal, or physical acts that are reasonably perceived to be threatening by the student-victim. In an effort to minimize this type of behavior in the school environment, the Shelby County Board of Education has created a process whereby a student, or the student’s parent or legal guardian, may report instances of harassment to the school administrator for further review and investigation. The reporting form is available through the school district’s website. When incidents of harassment are investigated and confirmed, the school administrator will apply appropriate disciplinary consequences.”

As we apply this standard at CHMS, we must look at the definition of bullying. In the board policy, it is stated that we need a “continuous pattern of intentional behavior.” This is the standard that we apply. For instance, if we have a student call another student a name one time, this is not necessarily bullying. But if every day, a student calls a student a derogatory name for a week, then the standard of a continuous pattern would apply. We then looked at our data. We looked at what types of incidents of bullying we see and the number of bullying incidents at this point in the year. As we looked at the current statistics, I have disciplined thirteen students out of a total population of 914 students or 1.4% of our student population. The noted incidents did not include sexual harassment as this is a separate statistic. These incidents would have been verbal or physical acts which were threatening towards another child. We noted that the majority of the thirteen students were 7th graders and were males. We pulled the folder with the harassment forms and only had a handful of forms which had been turned in by students. These forms are used to start a bullying investigation and only five of the forms lead to a disciplinary action. The other forms were situations in which we needed to mediate between friends. It was interesting to look at the data to see where the incidents occur. Several incidents occurred in the locker room or in PE. This is always an area of focus for us as a school. We had previously changed our supervision in these areas to minimize bullying in these areas. We will continue to monitor the bullying incidents this year and try to minimize unhealthy situations. We do not want any child to feel the way these children feel in the above video. But a key point for parents, teachers, and children is that they need to tell a school teacher/administrator/counselor if bullying is occurring. Nothing will be resolved or a situation improved until the school takes a course of action.