Shelly’s son has a problem. After being victimized by a bully, he’s victimized by the school system who recognizes that her son is acting in self-defense but nevertheless punishes him for doing so, while not protecting him or mitigating the bully situation at all. She has some strong words for the zero-tolerance paradigm:
I think that we are not helping the bully situation, what about the no tolorance programs in the schools for this type of behavior. While I don’t think Brandon will end up taking a gun to school, he is scarred by the school not backing him up when it comes to defending himself and I am half tempted to take this to the school board, as I can’t believe this is really the way we want this to be seen from the kids side.
My experience was similar. Imagine getting a call from the school that your 6-year old child is being suspended for biting, a behavior that he didn’t engage in when he was TWO, much less six. We rush down to the school ready to discipline our child severely, but first we get the story. “R”, a child twice Sticks’ size in weight and a full six inches taller, got Sticks in a choke hold. This is agreed upon by everyone. Sticks, panicking because he cannot breathe, performs the only defensive maneuver he can in that situation — he bites his captor’s arm. Bully lets go, both are remanded to the office where Sticks is told he is suspended for three days and the bully is sent home with a note advising parents that his behavior fell below the standards. NO detention. NO suspension. Just a note.
From that day forward Sticks is classified as “at risk” for being a kid in trouble. I swear I thought I was in an alternate universe. At Open House, “R’s” parents came up to T and I shaking their finger in our face telling us that if our son ever “got their son in trouble again they would beat the crap out of us.”. The apples don’t fall far from the tree, do they?
I have to say that Sticks actually came up with the creative answer to this one. Being gifted with a sense of humor and a strong sense of self-preservation, he set out to find a way to come to an even ground with “R”. By the end of the year (and I don’t know how he did this), he was able to get “R” to become his bodyguard. He used a combination of humor and humility and somehow it worked. We ran into “R” not too long ago, working as a bagger in our local market. Despite his parents, he’s actually grown into what appears to be a polite and responsible young man.
The villains in Shelly’s and my stories are not the bullies, their parents or our kids. The villains are the “do-it-by-the-book” administrators who beat their breasts about bullying and keeping it out of schools only to turn around and victimize the victims. When are we going to get people to take a look at what’s really going on in these situations instead of resorting to the knee-jerk procedural answers? Had I been the administrator in charge of Shelly’s case, I’d have done the following:
- Gotten the full story from both kids and the bus driver
- Made a determination as to who was responsible for beginning and escalating the conflict (the bus driver’s witness should have been the determinative factor)
- Assign a consequence to the initiators that identified their behavior as bullying and dealt with it accordingly, including isolating them from the situation by suspending them from the privilege of riding the bus for a week and forcing their parents to make arrangements to drive them to and from school.
- Enter into a contract with the bullies’ parents denoting what is and what is not acceptable behavior and what consequences the parents will suffer if their children do not change their behavior
- Enter into an agreement with the BULLIED outlining the required reporting procedures for any and all incidents which occur while the kids are on the bus, playground or in the classroom. Include a system for reporting incidents without being noticed; e.g., via notes placed in a box, given to the teacher etc.
I remember thinking during the Columbine shootings that there must have been so much anger and anguish inside of those kids that they really felt there were no options. In hindsight, the parents and school had a huge breadcrumb trail of clues that they missed. How can we really justify missing them now even if Shelly’s boy probably won’t react so violently to being bullied? How do we really know which bullied kid will go off because he feels completely unprotected by the system which he’s been told will protect him if he follows the rules?
Update: The story of an Arizona boy caught in the fog of school discipline over on The Education Wonks site.
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