Parents are right when they express a lack of confidence in the way bullying behaviour is being handled by schools. Schools just don’t seem to find dealing with the problem anywhere as near a priority as performing in standardised tests. Schools nowadays use simplistic and inept anti-bullying policies to point out to parents that they are proactive on the issue. In truth, all anti-bullying policies really does is protect a school from lawsuits. If policies worked the problem would’t be getting worse. But it is.
Detective Tim Toth, head of the youth services division of the City of Tonawanda Police Department is absolutely right:
“It’s great to tell the parents we have a bullying program in place, but until they take it serious and until the kids know there are consequences with what they do, the program is no good,” said Toth, who has also spent several years working at the high school as a resource officer.
I however disagree with Toth’s conclusions on cyberbullying:
“We don’t have the legal authority to intervene in a situation which exists between one child’s computer and another child’s computer when they are not being supervised when they are off school grounds,” noted Crawford. “But that doesn’t mean we don’t care…and it doesn’t mean we don’t make efforts to intervene when we can. But we need people, when we do attempt to intervene, to respond to us.”
That is a very poor response to an increasingly massive problem. Schools MUST intervene when it comes to cyberbullying. They MUST take more than a passing interest. Schools, police, parents and the wider school community must join forces to curb cyberbullying. It must be seen as a wider communal problem rather than something each and every stakeholder hides from.
Schools have got to ramp up their responses. Programs, procedures and policies is not enough. They will not work and never have. Appealing to kids to improve their communications wont work either.
Bullying hurts and sometimes kills. Surely schools have got that by now …
Topical Teaching 