Two weeks ago Joye Brown printed a story about a 10-year-old boy and his battle with school bullies. As an isolated incident, this would be a sad story. The truly great sadness is that yesterday Joye wrote a follow up article A bully story everyone knows.
In response to her first story she writes:
"For days, e-mails poured into my mailbox. From teachers, a lunchroom aide, lawyers, moms, dads and kids. They told of their experiences, and their battles with bullying.
"The most chilling were the e-mails that said they knew the boy, they knew the school district and even knew the school principal. The e-mails named names, but every last one of them was wrong. What does that say about bullying on Long Island?"
Think about what that means.
It seems like everyone personally knows of at least one incident of bullying in public schools. The great tragedy is that often the school's responses are ineffective. The bullies go unpunished.
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Technorati tags: bully, school
2 comments:
Thank you for this post. I hadn't heard the story before.
Your post inspired me to share a story of a bullying incident I witnessed in June 2003. I just blogged it, here.
http://thethinkingmother.blogspot.com/2007/02/bullying-at-school-scene-i-witnessed.html
It was heart breaking.
Last week or the week before Dr. Phil did a whole show on bullying. If I have time I will blog a summary of it.
It seems bullying is getting more press in these last few months.
I wonder if anything real will happen to fix it or if this is all just lip service or complaining that has no effect or change on reality.
Yeah...we have new legislation before the unicameral at the moment on the bullying issue. Some of the statistics are staggering.
On the other hand, as a former classroom teacher, I know sometimes the parents crying the loudest about bullies are the parents of the perpetrator. I think denial and enabling are a large part of it in at lease some cases.
The public schools response is ineffective and at times makes the problem even worse.
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