Schools Roll Out Plans to Get Tough on Bullies

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.

At the Capistrano Unified School District, Supt. James A. Fleming said campus officials will mete out harsher punishments to bullies and deliver more lessons on citizenship.

Assemblywoman Sally Havice (D-Cerritos) has introduced Assembly 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 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 School student choked a classmate, who recovered.

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

Over the summer, a group of 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 with a shooting at Santana High School in Santee that killed two and wounded 13, after being bullied by other students on campus, according to parents and school officials.

Although his son still has not offered an explanation for his actions, Charles “Jeff” Williams said in an interview to be broadcast tonight on ABC’s “PrimeTime Thursday” that Andy Williams was continually bullied.

Newport-Mesa Plan Comes Up for a Vote

“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 on 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 LAUSD, concerns tend to be directed at more violent incidents such as the Aug. 20 rape and robbery of two teachers at 99th Street Elementary School while they were preparing their classrooms for the school year. Willie Crittendon, director of school safety operations, said they 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.”

While school officials from Ventura to San Diego 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.”

But not insurance policies, like those being issued in France.

Deasy said he shuddered when he heard that some French companies have begun offering bully insurance to students in case their clothes are ripped, their book bags stolen or they are injured by a classmate. They seem to take bullying as a given, Deasy said.

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 driver’s license suspended and be forced to change schools.

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

But some administrators say they have become so aware of bullying that they feel compelled to take specific steps to stop it.

“Millions of students experience bullying and harassment,” said Fleming, the Capistrano district superintendent. “As a society, we must address this issue head-on.”

Fleming said he pored over accounts of the nation’s school shootings this summer and was horrified to realize that many of the gun-wielding teens said they had been bullied.

“You can impact the climate of the school if you work on it,” said Cyndie Borcoman, a parent at Corona del Mar High who fought for Newport-Mesa’s policy after she found out that her son saw one student physically attack another and, out of fear, did nothing to stop it.

“The purpose of this program is for more kids to come forward when they’re bullied, that they feel safe to do so.”