Schools grapple with bullying issue

by Matthew McCormick

April 13, 2008 | Valley News | Bradford, Vermont

Most days it began on the bus, innuendos and insults whispered just loud enough to reach Travis Johnson's ears.

They were a small group of classmates, but their barbs stung. Johnson said they mocked the stutter that sometimes appeared when he read aloud in class. They called his mother and sisters names. They spread lewd rumors.

At school things got worse. He came away from gym class hockey games with shins bruised by what he says were intentional hits. He was warned to watch his back or risk being pushed down the stairs. And one afternoon, he said, after inadvertently bumping into a fellow student in the library, he was surrounded and punched several times in the head.

Johnson often reacted with anger, serving up verbal volleys of his own. Other times he simply got sad. Most of all, though, he felt like giving up.

Never an A student, he began to fail his eighth-grade classes at Oxbow Union High School. He snapped at his three younger siblings at home. His smile disappeared.

“When kids are picking on you, you don't feel like doing anything,” Johnson, 14, said softly during an interview last week, a red polo shirt draped over his lanky, nearly 6-foot frame.

“You're mostly always angry or always mad.”

Johnson's a tale of bullying is unique neither to him nor to Oxbow. School officials have declined to comment on Johnson's experience, citing laws that protect student privacy. But they say that, while bullying does occur at the 460-student, seventh- through 12th-grade school, it is no worse than at similar institutions across the state and country.

Of the 660 incidents of bullying reported by Vermont schools to the state Department of Education in 2006-2007, one came from the Orange East Supervisory Union, which includes Oxbow, according to state education officials. In the same year, Hartford and Woodstock officials reported no bullying incidents while Windsor educators reported 10 incidents.

The situation at Oxbow, though, has prompted enough concern to spark the formation of a parent-led committee designed to help tackle bullying at Oxbow. The group held its second meeting last week.

The Oxbow group is not alone. Vermont education officials in the past several years have launched a push to put bullying prevention programs in all the state's schools, and already they say the work is beginning to pay off.

“A number of schools are doing it quite successfully and are seeing dramatic drops in bullying when they employ these schoolwide approaches,” said Richard Boltax, a consultant at the Vermont Department of Education who works on bullying issues.

Across the river at Plainfield Elementary School, teacher Susan Pullen's fourth-grade class just completed a three-week program with Emily Marrazzo of Turning Points Network that promotes respect, empathy and violence prevention. Student activities included conflict-resolution role playing games and drawing pictures of their experiences and emotions that will be compiled into a book.

The Turning Points Network is presented to second- through eighth-graders at the school and is designed to help build students' interpersonal skills each year with the ultimate goal of preventing domestic and sexual violence and stalking.

‘Kids Can Be Cruel'

Bullying has not always been in the educational limelight. While the behavior always has been found on playgrounds and school hallways, Boltax said, bullying had been seen as typical student behavior to be dealt with on a case-by-case and student-by-student basis, not a societal problem worthy of large-scale prevention efforts.

“One of the problems in the past was that bullying was accepted as a rite of passage,” Boltax said. “It was, ‘This is what kids do. Kids can be cruel.' ”

But that view slowly began to change, a trend that accelerated dramatically after April 20, 1999, when two teenagers killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded 21 others before taking their own lives at Columbine High School in Colorado, said Ruth Hamilton, a University of Vermont education professor and coordinator of the state's Building Effective Support for Teaching Students with Behavioral Challenges, or BEST, program.

“A lot of our shooter incidents that have happened at elementary, high school and college level are by students who felt disenfranchised and alienated from their peers and felt bullied,” Hamilton said.

Vermont had its own wake-up call as well. In October 2003, Ryan Halligan, 13, an eighth-grader from Essex Junction, committed suicide after what his father, John, described as years of intense bullying combined with clinical depression.

Halligan's death helped spark legislation in 2004 requiring all of the state's schools to develop plans for responding to bullying and collect data on reported bullying incidents. A similar law was enacted in New Hampshire.

“Bullying has been relabeled as a form of social abuse,” Boltax said. “When you start thinking about bullying in that paradigm, you start thinking about it in a different way and you start taking it very seriously.”

Two Responses

An increased emphasis in recent years on student test results also has forced educators to take a closer look at bullying, Boltax said.

“As schools were really focusing on results they also started identifying barriers to educational success,” he said. “Bullying was identified by teachers in Vermont and around the country as one of the most pressing problems affecting the school environment.”

That realization helped spark scientific inquiries into what works when it comes to strategies to reduce bullying in schools, Boltax said. And what works, he said, are not only case-by-case interventions and punitive consequences, but also schoolwide programs designed to help prevent bullying before it starts and reward positive action as much as they punish bad behavior.

Two such programs are now working their way into Vermont schools, and Boltax said both have yielded results.

The first, known as the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program, was developed by Swedish psychologist Dan Olweus (pronounced Ol-VEY-us) in the 1980s. The program begins with a student survey to help administrators and teachers determine the extent, type and location of bullying in their school.

The information can help schools better allocate resources -- by beefing up supervision in problem areas, for instance -- designed to deter the behavior.

The Olweus program also sets school rules about bullying, calling on students not to bully, to include fellow students who are being left out, to help students who are being bullied and to report instances of bullying to an adult at school and at home. The rules are reinforced in weekly meetings dedicated to lessons and discussions about bullying.

About 20 schools in Vermont have begun using the Olweus system since Hamilton began training educators in the program about four years ago. Among them is Hartford Memorial Middle School, where the percentage of students reporting instances of bullying fell from 16.7 percent to 8.7 percent between 2004 and 2006, according to a 2007 Vermont Department of Education report.

“I don't know if you can put your finger on it and say it is because of this program that we have less bullying,” said John Grant, principal at the middle school. “But I do believe it has helped. It has certainly created an awareness. We do a lot of work with adults in how do you handle these situations when you come across them.”

The second bullying prevention program is known as Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, or PBIS. Under the system, which is now in use in a handful of schools, educators create and teach specific behavioral expectations for the entire school, defining, for instance, what respect means in settings as varied as the cafeteria and the classroom. Data from disciplinary incident reports is then used to identify students who need group or one-on-one help to learn and adhere to those expectations.

The program also calls for teachers and administrators to point out and reward positive behavior by students.

At Mount Abraham Union High School in Bristol, Vt., where the PBIS program is in its first year, Diane Treadway, the school's special services director, said office discipline referrals this year are down by more than 70 percent compared to 2006-2007.

“What we're finding is, if we can catch negative behavior early and give kids some additional skills, it doesn't need to become a chronic issue,” Treadway said.

Responsive Classrooms

Superintendent Wendy Baker said Oxbow and its sending schools -- primarily the elementary schools in Bradford and Newbury -- already have bullying prevention programs and lessons in place.

The elementary schools, she said, use a system called Responsive Classroom, in which teachers begin each morning with discussions and activities designed to teach students to treat each other with respect.

Baker said the program has been a success at the elementary school level. But despite school assemblies, group discussions and individual interventions at Oxbow, she said, the lessons learned have not followed students into the seventh grade and beyond.

“The elementary school program that teaches kids to treat each other with civility is very rich,” Baker said. “One of the things we're trying to get to the bottom of is, why does that not transfer to the middle school and the high school?”

She said school officials now are evaluating several different bullying prevention programs, including PBIS and a system that would pair students with teacher advisers.

“There are several different approaches to find ways to get kids into smaller groups to ensure that any issues that are bubbling up between them are resolved,” Baker said. “A teacher adviser gives kids one teacher they can go to. Kids are more apt to say something in terms of having a conflict with a peer if they have an adult they know to go to.”

Whatever program the school adopts, she said, community participation -- such as the bullying prevention committee that began meeting bimonthly at Grace United Methodist Church in Bradford -- will be essential to its success.

The committee is brainchild of Sharon McCallie-Steller, who said her eighth-grade son experienced bullying at Oxbow. “We want to get to the bigger issue,” she told the Valley News for a report published last week. “Maybe it's not actual bullying. Maybe it's communication. Maybe kids feel they have nowhere to turn,” she said.

McCallie-Steller's committee consists of parents, administrators and state officials. Though now just a dozen members strong, the group in the near future hopes to swell its ranks and begin developing ideas to address bullying at the school and in the community through study circles -- small groups that discuss ways to address an issue and then bring those ideas to a larger group.

“This is an issue that the school can take some steps toward resolving, but it's also an issue that is important in terms of the parents' response,” Baker said. “We need to put school, parental and community expectations on the same page in regards to the way that kids treat each other.”

But Kana Johnson said her son, Travis, cannot wait that long.

Nearly three weeks ago, she filed an application with the state for permission to home-school him. In the meantime, she is tutoring him at home between daily trips to school to pick up and drop off his homework. And next year, she said, she hopes to move out of the district.

“I realize that this is going on at other schools,” Kana Johnson said. “But this school is our school. It needs to be set in stone that if you are threatening other students, you are not going to be allowed in school.”

Valley News staff photographer James M. Patterson contributed to this report.

http://www.vnews.com/04132008/4796841.htm

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