Schools Roll Out Programs to Help Crack Down on Bullies

Cracking down on bullying will be a major campus objective this year, according to 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 says campus officials will mete out harsher punishments to bullies and deliver more lessons on citizenship.

Assemblywoman Sally Havice (D-Cerritos) has introduced AB 79, which 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 place 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.

But after the policy was proposed came the challenges: 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 a shooting at Santana High School in Santee, Calif., killed two and wounded 13. Charles “Andy” Williams, the suspect, was bullied by other students on campus, according to parents and school officials.

While his son still has not offered an explanation for his actions, Charles “Jeff” Williams said in an interview to be broadcast tonight on ABC-TV that Andy Williams was constantly victimized by bullies. Prosecutors, however, disagree.

“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 touches 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 such actions. Under the plan, which comes up for a vote Tuesday, 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 to 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 academic year. Willie Crittendon, director of school safety operations, said the district is 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 like Newport-Mesa’s, other districts say they already have them. The 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.”

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