If you grew up in the 60s and 70s, you send your kids to school with a vague sense of unease. Sure, Kindergarten looks gentle and fun, but there are those bigger kids barreling through the hallways. If you got to a K-8, the eight graders look ready to go to war or bear children. Or both at once. You remember things you wish you didn’t. Moments that hurt you in ways that nothing before or since ever have.
Maybe you’re one of the lucky ones with no such memories; the strange thing is, most kids have them—how is it that everyone was a bullied nerd, and no one was the bully? (During World War Two, every Frenchmen was in the resistance, too.)
Most of us reading this blog have horror stories. Beatings and fights and wedgies. The kid who sat next to me in high-school hung himself halfway through the school year, and I spent the rest of the year in my assigned seat, with Joe’s seat empty beside me, as I contemplated following him into oblivion. We carry this stuff around with us forever. There’s a reason the High School film is a box office staple. School is the place where often, for better or worse, we define ourselves.
So you pack your kid off to school, wondering. Do we have to move to the suburbs? Is a private school necessary? Should we home school? Could we afford that…would it drive us crazy?
School seems different, where we are now, at any rate.
We toured the schools (our district has School Choice) and found them changed almost beyond recognition. Gone the grids of desks bolted to the ground facing the blackboard wall. In our school, the Mr. and Mister have been dropped. Say Hello to Principal Bill! Every room, K-4 has a carpeted area where kids gather for the morning meeting, and sometimes sit reading books. Desks are pushed together in pods; teachers move from Pod to pod working with kids moving at their own speeds, some with specialized curriculum and affordances.
Kids with ADD have little toys they can fiddle with. Two out of ten kids have pull-out instruction and IEPs; they get extra help with math, reading, their handwriting, and there are so many of them there seems to be no stigma attached.
And in many places, The Lord of the Flies, don’t ask don’t tell attitude towards bullying is a thing of the past.
The girl who bullied my kid on the bus was kicked off that bus for a week. This gets a parent’s attention, as they must know make arrangements to get that kid to and from school themselves. She had to write a two page essay on bullying, and have her father sign the document and return it. Bullys and their victims meet with a vice principal and are led through a conflict resolution process; witness are called, competing versions of what happened are reconciled, and consequences are meted out.
In Oscar’s case, it turns out that he’d been saving up incidents and not reporting them, so as they spilled out, it was hard to sort out what had happened when, but eventually the girl, who denied everything, was confronted with witnesses who made her acknowledge what she’d done. New to our school, I have no doubt that what she thought, and did, lurks in the hearts of many of the kids around Oscar every day.
But, when push comes to shove, bullying Oscar just isn’t worth the hassle.
For one thing, he doesn’t turn on himself. Call him a name and he responds with a shriek of even-more-foul-obscenity. Frequently his language is itself a violation of school policy, as it was on the Bus last week. (Oscar’s teacher once informed me that while she knew that ‘rules were different in our house,’ but we needed to tell Oscar that in school there were words he couldn’t use. Um. Thanks.)
“We decided to let the language go this time,” the Vice Principal told me. “We wanted Oscar to feel supported. We knew this was hard for him.”
Going through the motions of the therapeutic give and take I’m sure means nothing for many of the kids, no more than does sensitivity training or court-ordered AA. But these are all consequences. So they matter.
If you think about it, the fact that fighting—assaults—between children were more or less shrugged off in our childhoods, and that verbal abuse was considered just a part of growing up, is odd, because these are things adults do not tolerate among themselves.
If a coworker punched or spit on your or grabbed your underwear, there would be consequences. Even in the 60s and 70s adults wouldn’t dream of tolerating this, among themselves.
If your kid is being bullied, please go to Google and type ‘Bullying resources,’ and see what pops up. There’s help out there, and in the end, there are legal recourses in many states that can create consequences for schools who turn a blind eye on bullying, by punching the institution in its pocketbook.
All that’s required is that we stop thinking of bullying as a part of growing up. Because it only is if we, collectively, let it be. Once a critical mass of concerned parents act, bullying recedes. It may never be completely eliminated, but it no longer has to be the defining experience of childhood.
Childhood should be fun.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Many schools take bullying very seriously and even teach anti-bullying curriculum. However, often times staff are unaware when it happens because it isn’t reported. I do recommend calling and talking to an administrator or counselor to see what steps have and can be taken.
I agree, parental involvement is what makes all this work; without it, there are no consequences. Our school canceling the bus, running through the conflict resolution, assigning the essay—signed by the bully’s parents (which I was permitted to read.) all of it, only occurred because I made the complaint. My son had mixed feelings; didn’t want to be a snitch. I forced the issue and I’m lucky that they responded in a reasonable fashion. I know of many parents who haven’t been so lucky. We all do what we can do.
You and your son are privileged to have such a wonderful school. I’m a sophomore in public high school, and last week four boys made around 30+ derogatory remarks about homosexuality within clear earshot of the teacher. She did absolutely nothing, didn’t even acknowledge it, although she’s quick to tell off anyone who dares swear in her classroom. I smacked one of them over the head with my notebook (he’s done this before and challenged me to a fight, so in my defense, it was well overdue), and after school was released went to the office. The receptionist directed me to the vice principal, who took down the boys’ names and a description of the incident, telling me he would deal with them and thanking me for reporting them, all the while staring at my chest. It’s been over a week since the event took place, and to the best of my knowledge, not a single thing has been done.
As much as I hate to teach, I’m seriously considering home schooling my future child(ren) so they won’t have to put up with this. Although I would dearly love the opportunity to be the irate parent, storming into the principal’s office, smoke pouring out of my ears…
Thank God you and Oscar are having better luck with the school district you live in.
I’m sorry to hear about your situation; i think even for this area we are very lucky, and a few dedicated homophobes could make our lives a living hell.
Are your parents supportive? I think they should call the school and ask what actions are being taken against the boys in this case. I don’t think they’ll ever respect you, but a persistent focus on this could I think make it not worth the while to do this during school hours. I could understand being loathe to do this for fear of repercussions outside of school though. Still, you seem very brave, and I think that pursuing this further might be a good thing for you, your school, and the kids themselves, who could find themselves on the other side of a lawsuit when they enter the workforce.
This is a civil rights issue; if you can prove that the environment in your school is preventing you from getting your public education, there is often recourse. Without any explicit protection from hate crimes or anti-bullying legislation, there are still options for legal action. Sometimes you can force a school system to pay for a private tutor; this costs big bucks, so schools who don’t give a rat’s ass about social justice will often come around and do something when you threaten to hit them in the pocketbook.
It’s never a good idea to start a conversation by talking about suing someone or filing suit, but knowing that that is an option can inform your family’s negotiations with the school, and it exists as a final resort.
Good luck!