COLUMBUS, Ohio–Bullying, or harassment, is an unfortunate part of the school experience for many students. So educators at the local and state level are fighting against this threatening, or tormenting, behavior with new policies and methods of combating bullying in public schools–including helping students help themselves.
According to disciplinary statistics from the Ohio Department of Education, 17,193 incidents of harassment and/or intimidation were reported in Ohio for the 2013-2014 school year. Of the total incidents reported, 236 resulted in expulsion, 11,031 resulted in out-of-school suspensions, 3,622 in-school suspensions, 1,596 in-school alternative disciplines, and 708 emergency removals by district personnel.
According to John Charlton, Associate Director of Communications for the Ohio Department of Education, bullying reports fall under the category of harassment and intimidation, and schools only report bullying incidents that end in a suspension or expulsion.
“There could be several incidents of bulling that take place in a school but it never gets reported because it doesn’t end in suspension or expulsion, but the school may have other intervention programs,” he said.
However, Charlton also acknowledged that some bullying incidents might be accidentally classified in other disciplinary categories.
“A lot of times what you see in a building, what a teacher may see is a fight,” he said. “It gets reported as a fight or violence in the school as opposed to a bullying situation, but the fight may have derived from a bullying situation. All that kind of skews the data.”
These bullying statistics stem from a model policy first approved by the Ohio State Board of Education in 2007. The model policy contains procedures for reporting, documenting and investigating incidents of harassment, intimidation and bullying, including cyber bullying. Among policy requirements is a mandate for districts to locally report on a semiannual basis a summary of reported incidents.
“We wanted a policy in place to give direction to schools, and provide a safe environment for kids,” said Jill Jackson, Director of the Center for P-20 Safety and Security at the Ohio Department of Education. “The purpose is to look at the data and to identify how we can better as a state agency provide support to partnering state agencies. As we collect data, our role is to provide resources, training, research, and evidence-based strategy to have as part of schools’ repertoire.”
Efforts to prohibit bullying in Richland County starts with reducing the 250 reported incidents of harassment and/or intimidation in the 2013-2014 school year. Of the 250 incidents reported, 123 resulted in out-of-school suspensions and 127 resulted in in-school suspensions.
Shelby City Schools Superintendent Tim Tarvin stated that Shelby started tracking their bullying incidents in 2011, after the need arose to create a uniform measurement of what bullying is that would be considered a standards throughout the entire district.
“The whole idea is not necessarily to catch kids who are bullying – the bigger picture is to help kids recognize what bullying is, so that kids who are being bullied can help themselves as well,” said Tarvin.
Tarvin explained Shelby’s definition of bullying is the same from the elementary schools to the high school, and the consequences of bullying are the same throughout a student’s career in Shelby City Schools. An incident is considered bullying in Shelby if it is repeated, which administration can track through documentation.
“If it happens again whether it’s five days or five months later, that’s what we consider bullying,” said Tarvin. “If it’s a one-time incident it’s not considered bullying, and that’s a difficult thing to explain to kids, parents and the community. It’s still an issue, we’re going to take care of it even if it’s a one-time deal, but to meet our standard of what bullying is it has to be on some level repetitive.”
Repeated bullying incidents are not exclusive to one bully-to-victim scenario. Tarvin explained that if the same student were bullying multiple victims, that student would still fall under the umbrella of a bully.
“That’s the nice thing about having this documentation it will capture that scenario,” said Tarvin. “You can go to a student’s file and pull out the bullying card. Even more than that, if in the next school year the bullying starts again those cards follow that student, not to have an administrator work from a negative position but rather it will shed light on the bully’s behavior.”
Tracking bullying incidents is a crucial factor to eliminating the bullying problem according to Jim Bisenius, a child and adolescent therapist specializing in teaching students how to handle bullying situations. Bisenius has presented his “Bully-Proofing Youth” program across the country, including Richland County schools Richland Academy, Malabar Middle School, Shelby City Schools, Ontario Middle School, and Galion Schools.
“The tracking, if it’s done the right way would be helpful,” said Bisenius. “It would tend to let schools know how much is going on, but even with the tracking you’d probably double it or triple it because so much is going on under the radar and nobody knows it. It’s been that way since our parents and even our grandparents’ generation.”
Bisenius stated that subtle mocking, social isolation and exclusion, shunning, and starting rumors are all examples of bullying behavior. These behaviors, he stated, most of the time aren’t coming from the “dirty-faced kid” beating people up on the playground but rather from the popular-appearing students who are ruthless.
“Those are the kids that run most schools,” he said. “The problems I see is a lot of the bullies totally control their peers. More than half of the time when a school punishes based on hearsay, they double punish the victim.”
The Ohio Department of Education’s model policy states school policy must include “a procedure for responding to and investigating any reported incident, including providing intervention strategies for protecting a victim or other person from additional harassment, intimidation or bullying, and from retaliation following a report, including a means by which a person may report an incident anonymously.” The anonymity factor is crucial, according to Bisenius.
“If tracking requires public information of who told, then that only makes the situation worse,” said Bisenius. “If it’s a situation where teachers stake out an anonymous report and catch the kids directly, those are very helpful to get an adult’s eyes on it. Those kind of things set the tone and let kids know this is the way we treat each other.”
Still, besides reporting and tracking bullying incidents Bisenius said it is crucial for students to retain their personal power and dignity through simple action steps that alter body language and control reactions to bullying. These action tools are ones Tarvin hopes to adopt in Shelby City Schools.
“We want kids to know that those who are bullying are going to have consequences, and if you are being bullied we’re going to work to make it stop for you, and teach you some skills so if you get bullied in the future you know what can you do to counter that bullying in a positive fashion,” said Tarvin. “The idea is there are obviously two different situations from the perspective of how you deal with them, but we would be doing a disservice if all we were doing was disciplining the bully and not providing any skills for them to overcome that. If we’re not doing that, then we’re doing something wrong.”
Whether an improvement has been made yet in bullying since the state introduced its model policy in 2007, Jackson says it’s still too soon to tell. While bullying awareness and education has certainly been raised, the numbers may not yet reflect bullying eradication.
“Incidents reported where maybe they weren’t reported before could also be an improvement because it means schools are being more attentive and intentional about addressing behavior,” said Jackson. “Qualitatively, given the situation it could be they’re being tougher on bullying so staff is more attuned, sending students to offices more, and addressing activity that way.”
It’s a pragmatic approach that Tarvin recognizes, noting that while it would be nice to eradicate bullying completely in Shelby that goal may be slightly unrealistic.
“Elevated numbers [of incident reports] reflect we’re being proactive,” he said. “But all numbers aside, the fact that we should be addressing bullying and taking care of it in a timely manner, not sweeping it under the rug, is the right thing to do for the health and safety of our kids and a better environment for our school. Even if you took all the data out of it, it’s the right thing to do. The data to me is a sidebar to the actual policy and procedure. If you’re doing it right, the data will reflect that.”
