Schools Roll Out Programs to Battle Bullying

Cracking down on bullying will be a major campus objective this year, say many school officials who spent the summer studying school shootings and character education.

In southern Orange County’s Capistrano Unified School District, Supt. James A. Fleming said campus officials will mete out harsher punishments to bullies and deliver more lessons on citizenship.

In Ventura County, the superintendent of schools office spent the last six months conducting workshops to help teachers recognize when bullying occurs and learn how to intervene.

Somis Union, a rural district with one elementary school and one middle school, passed a zero-tolerance policy on bullying last spring.

“The reason for the policy is twofold: We need to protect the kids who are victims of bullies, and protect others when the victims have had enough,” said Supt. Richard Malfatti.

Assemblywoman Sally Havice (D-Cerritos) has introduced Bill 79 that would require all school districts to institute bully-prevention programs and teach conflict resolution.

And in the Los Angeles Unified School District, trustee Julie Korenstein has pledged to bring an anti-bullying policy before the board this fall.

“The anti-bullying concept is extremely popular right now,” said Ron Stephens, executive director of the National School Safety Center. “Bullying is one of the most underrated yet enduring problems. A bully can terrorize a school.”

But who are the campus bullies, and what can officials do to stop them? Shaking down a classmate for lunch money is definitely bullying behavior, but what about making faces across the classroom? Do shouted slurs count?

Anyone who has ever been bullied knows what it is, but recognizing it from the outside and devising programs to eliminate it are other matters.

“A lot of it is not always black and white,” said Jaime Castellanos, head of secondary education at the Newport-Mesa Unified School District. “We need to help our teachers identify bullying and intimidation.”

As Newport-Mesa tries to figure that out, officials around the country are watching. Last spring, the 21,000-student district became perhaps the first in the nation to adopt a zero-tolerance stance toward bullying. While stopping short of automatically expelling bullies for a first offense, board members specifically added restrictions on bullying to their discipline code.

The California Education Code already punishes most infractions covered under the new bullying policy, but the board acted because parents and administrators wanted to declare that bullying would not be tolerated. Parents lobbied for the bullying rules and helped write them after a Corona del Mar High student choked a classmate, who recovered.

Bullying Seen as Precursor to Violence

But after proposing the policy came the hard parts: how to define bullying, and how to discourage it.

Over the summer, parents, students and administrators wrestled with those and other questions.

There was agreement on one issue: Stopping bullying is crucial because it can lead to deadly violence. This was driven home March 5 when Charles “Andy” Williams was charged in a shooting at Santana High School in Santee that killed two and wounded 13, after being bullied by other students, according to parents and school officials.

While his son still has not offered an explanation for his alleged actions, Charles “Jeff” Williams said in an interview to be broadcast tonight on ABC’s PrimeTime Thursday that Andy was constantly victimized by bullies.

“Bullying has been around for a long time,” said Perry Nelson, coordinator of the School Mental Health Project at UCLA. “But it’s come to the forefront as an issue, and people are starting to address it. . . . But just telling kids not to bully is not going to work.”

Last week, administrators in Newport-Mesa put the final polish on their policy. According to Castellanos, it lists examples of bullying, from a facial expression to a bump in a hallway to a racial slur, and prescribes steps for administrators to follow when they encounter it. Under the plan, which comes up for a vote Tuesday, both the victim and the bully could be referred to counseling and all school employees would be trained to recognize bullying.

In the sprawling Los Angeles Unified School District, concerns tend to be directed at more violent incidents such as the Aug. 20 rape and robbery of two teachers at the 99th Street Elementary School while they were preparing their classrooms for the school year. A 19-year-old man was arrested in the case.

Willie Crittendon, director of school safety operations, said officials are reevaluating all campus safety policies.

But school board member Korenstein said more attention should be paid to bullying.

“What we’re realizing is there are certain misbehaviors among students that tend to be overlooked,” she said. “People say, ‘Oh, boys will be boys,’ . . . but it really can cause major problems on campus. You hear from parents, students and teachers. It impacts everyone’s lives.”

Policies Nothing New for Some Districts

While school officials from Ventura to San Diego now are exploring anti-bullying policies such as Newport-Mesa’s, other districts say they already have them. Santa Monica Unified School District, for example, adopted rules aimed at stopping bullying nearly 10 years ago.

“If we are a community that believes in tolerance and acceptance, then there is no place for bullying or harassment of any form,” Supt. John Deasy said. “Therefore, there should be policies.”

This is the policy in Deasy’s 16-school district: Students may face detention, suspension or other disciplinary measures if they bully another student with disparaging comments, obscene gestures or violence based on gender, race, disability, sexual orientation or other characteristics.

Edward Sussman, superintendent of the 22,000-student Downey School District, said Downey already has a disciplinary system that has worked exceptionally well against bullying and other offenses.

The high schools in the Downey district issue citations for bullying, truancy, fighting, vandalism and other infractions. Police officers patrol campuses and cite kids who get into trouble.

Students then must appear in Superior Court with their parents and could be fined up to $300, have their drivers licenses suspended and be forced to change schools.

Many officials are crafting specific anti-bullying policies because the mass media and parents have defined it as “a specific kind of violence,” he said. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to identify.