Plenty of children — and some of their parents — will likely have butterflies in their stomachs as they approach the start of another school year this week.
It’s the kind of nervousness that goes away once everyone has settled into the new routine. Unless, of course, there’s a bully in the picture.
For many children who suffered at the hands of bullies last year, the dominant back-to-school emotion isn’t so much nervousness as abject dread.
Fortunately things are changing, as evidenced by the attention being given to this problem by area school districts. As Citizen reporters have spoken to school principals and superintendents about the opening of school, every one of them has drawn attention to the efforts under way to ensure that all students will find their schools to be hospitable environments.
The role of teachers and administrators and other school staffers is critical to the effort. But so, too, is the role of parents.
Most studies find the vast majority of children never report incidents of bullying and those studies also show that notifying parents when bullying is observed has been uneven.
Confronting the problem of bullying must be the beginning of an ongoing dialogue between parents and school officials. It is only through such follow-up that a parent can determine if appropriate steps are being taken to resolve the issue or, in some cases, whether law enforcement officials should be involved.
It is also important to bear in mind that having an anti-bullying policy on the books is one thing; changing school and teen cultures that have traditionally turned a blind eye to bullying is quite another.
Changing that culture starts with open discussions about what bullying is, and what students and teachers should do when they see it happening. In Gilford schools, for example Middle School Principal Marcia Ross said the students are being given an orientation on a new school culture initiative which revolves around the four words: respectful, resourceful, responsible and confident
Initiatives of this sort are important for the bullies as well as their targets. Some studies have found a link between bullying and later legal and criminal encounters as an adult. In one tracking study, 60 percent of those identified as bullies in grades 6 through 9 had at least one criminal conviction by age 24.
Lesson one for the 2010-2011 school year is how students and teachers can know bullying when they see it, and stop it before someone gets hurt.
