Law firmer against bullies

Metro Atlanta school districts recorded more than 1,900 instances of bullying in the 2009-2010 academic year, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution survey found. Just 30 students were expelled, sent to alternative schools or placed in other classes, as the law requires in documented cases of bullying.

DeKalb County schools led the list with 696 incidents, but did not record how many students were removed from class or faced disciplinary action. The law, school administrators noted, does not require that they keep track of disciplinary measures. That does not mean the system does not take bullying seriously, said Quentin Fretwell, director of student relations.

“If an incident is recorded, an action toward resolution is taken,” he said in an e-mail.

At the other end of the spectrum, Decatur recorded no bullying cases.

This year, Georgia lawmakers responded to parents’ concerns and amended the state anti-bullying statute.

For the Haralson County girl, the changes came too late. When her parents complained, education officials dismissed their concerns. The child, they said, was exaggerating.

The year ended, and the girl got a summertime respite. When another academic year started in August, said her parents, the bullying picked up where it left off. Her parents removed the girl from school a month later. Now, they’re home-schooling their daughter, 10, and hope to enroll her in another school next year.

The child who bullied her daughter? “Still in that school,” said the mother.

Bullying, an age-old problem in schools, is again a hot topic these days, with the suicide this year of a New Jersey college student who was humiliated online as well as the 2009 deaths of a DeKalb fifth-grader and Murray County youth who were allegedly bullied by schoolmates.

Educators say the problem is very difficult to eradicate: Students often are reluctant to report bullying, and it can be hard to detect. Some smaller school districts do not have an alternative school for bullies.

Yet changes are coming. The legislation Georgia lawmakers approved this year tightens the state bullying law. Public school systems across Georgia — 170 in all — have until Aug. 1 to adopt policies that meet the requirements of Georgia’s revised bullying law. Until then, they are following local guidelines that critics say vary from one system to the next.

Bullying defined

According to the revised law, acts of bullying include:

● Any written, verbal or physical act that threatens, harasses or intimidates a student.

● Acts that cause “substantial physical harm.”

● Anything that creates “an intimidating or threatening educational environment.”

The revised law takes enforcement a step further, recognizing that bullying happens off-campus, too. Bullying may be “an act which occurs ... on school vehicles, at designated school bus stops, or at school-related functions or activities.”

And, in a sign of the times, the amended law recognizes the threat of bullying “by use of data or software that is accessed through a computer, computer system, computer network, or other electronic technology of a local school system.”

Before its revision, the statute defined bullying as an attempt to threaten of injure another student, or as an “intentional display of force” designed to intimidate a student. It didn’t recognize off-campus or cyber-bullying.

The amended law improves a statute that was too vague and unevenly enforced, said Patti Agatston, a professional counselor who has worked with Cobb schools on bullying.

“The new law,” she said, “has taken some steps in the right direction.”

But tighter regulations can go only so far, parents, education officials and bullying victims said.

“I hope it helps, but I don’t know,” said the 10-year-old Haralson girl, whose parents pulled her out of school. “I don’t want to go back to that school.”

Inadequate statute

Bullying took national stage in September after 18-year-old Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi jumped off the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River. His death underscored the growing threat of cyber-bullying: Clementi was humiliated online after his roommate allegedly secretly webcast the freshman’s romantic encounter with another man.

In Georgia, school officials in Fayette County confronted cyber-bullying last month when they discovered a Facebook page that taunted some middle-school students with anti-gay slurs, rated others on their attractiveness and offered inappropriate photos of at least one female student. The page, thought to be have been created by students, has been removed.

The suicides of two Georgia students also have been linked to bullying. Jaheem Herrera, 11, a DeKalb fifth-grader; and 17-year-old Tyler Lee Long of Murray County, hanged themselves last year.

Jaheem’s death prompted Rep. Mike Jacobs, R-Atlanta, to sponsor amendments to the state’s bullying law. Effective in January, the revised law requires the state Department of Education to develop a bullying policy that local school systems can use as a model.

The former statute, said Jacobs, didn’t adequately define bullying, didn’t address cyber-bullying and applied only to grades 6-12, overlooking about half the state’s students — those in grades k-5. Jaheem, Jacobs noted, was in the fifth grade.

“When I looked at it [old statute], it was horrendously inadequate,” said Jacobs, who lives in DeKalb.

Atlanta lawyer Julie Oinonen, whose website offers representation for bullying victims, agrees that changes in the law were overdue.

“Kids’ lives and physical well-being are being put at risk,” said Oinonen, a former educator who established her Atlanta law practice two years ago.

Detection difficult

For Austin Laufersweiler, the revised law comes too late. The 19-year-old Cobb County man said he endured bullying in elementary and middle school as classmates taunted him in person and online, calling him homosexual.

“I felt uncomfortable,” said Laufersweiler. “I guess I always had the feeling of being unsafe.”

It was only when he went to Lassiter High School, with its larger, more diverse student body, that the bullying stopped. There, he found friends, and came to terms with his sexual orientation.

Now an openly gay freshman at the University of Georgia, Laufersweiler thinks the new law will help because it is specific in defining bullying. “But there’s only so much you can do,” he said.

Karen Griffith, an educator for three decades, agrees. “It’s so hard to distinguish the difference between bullying and the conflicts that occur between children at any given moment,” said Griffith, a counselor at Berkeley Lake Elementary, which more than 1,110 Gwinnett students attend.

One kid pushing another in line, she said, is probably not bullying. “But if it happens to the same child day after day, it is.”

In Gwinnett, teachers have begun enlisting students to help stop bullying — for the students to denounce a bully when he or she picks on someone else. She calls it “positive peer pressure.”

And she hopes there’s strength in numbers.

“Any adult you talk to can quickly identify a bullying event in their history,” she said. “It’s going to take a whole lot of people doing a whole lot of things go make it stop.”

‘Act of violence’

They were friends as they entered their freshman year. But one girl decided that the other had a crush on her boyfriend and thus began a two-year ordeal for a Cobb County 17-year-old.

The girl’s mother said her daughter tried to stay out of the girl’s way — but the other girl sought her out and enlisted friends to harass the girl. They yelled at her in hallways and bumped her when classes changed. The mother watched her daughter — normally a sunny, upbeat kid — become quiet, withdrawn.

“She stopped going to football games and other things” to avoid her tormentors, said the mother, who called school administrators and wrote them letters complaining about the abuse. School officials said they had no proof that bullying occurred.

It wasn’t until she enlisted the help of school counselors that she got results: The girls who’d been badgering her daughter for two years were assigned to other classes.

“Now, she’s [her daughter] a completely turned-around person,” said her mother. “She has a bazillion friends.”

Garry McGiboney has heard parents’ complaints before. An associate superintendent for the state Department of Education, McGiboney has been studying bullying for decades.

When McGiboney visits a school, he makes sure to stop by the cafeteria. Any student, he said, whom he sees going from one table to another, only to be turned away, is getting bullied — and the school is allowing it.

“Bullying,” he said, “is a school climate issue.”

Bullying is not a recent phenomenon, said McGiboney, an educator for 35 years. He held his first anti-bullying workshop in 1992.

Will the revised statute help? McGiboney thinks so. Enforcing the law in lower grades, he said, may improve climates in schools where the abuse has flourished.

“You can change the mind set of a fifth-grader,” he said. “Bullying is not a rite of going to school. It is an act of violence.”

The old law

Defines bullying as threatening or inflicting injury on another student, accompanied by a “display of force” that would give a victim reason to fear harm.

Addresses bullying in grades 6-12.

The new law

Expands where bullying may occur – school property, school vehicles, school bus stops or at school-related activities. It also defines cyber-bullying. Bullying can be an activity which interferes with a student’s education, creates a threatening environment, and can substantially disrupt a school’s operation.

BULLYING STATISTICS

Unless otherwise noted, all data came from the 2009-2010 school year. The first number represents bullying cases; the second depicts the number of students transferred toalternative schools, expelled or offered some other alternative:

*Based on 2008-09 academic year

**The district does not keep records of transfers or disciplinary actions

How we got the story

A grandmother of a student who’d been bullied called the AJC, complaining that school districts rarely confronted bullying as the law required. Staff writer Mark Davis contacted metro area school districts and determined the caller’s complaint had merit: Districts seldom remove perpetual bullies from classrooms or schools, according to statistics.

Parents interviewed for this story asked to remain anonymous, fearing the bullying their children endured might resume if their names were known.