Schools seeing inroads on curbing bullying

STAFF WRITER

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Schools in New Mexico counties are combating bullying in compliance with state law and officials say they are seeing positive results.

The state Public Education Department requires every school district and state-chartered school to implement bullying prevention programs, according to the education department’s website.

The website defines “bullying” as “any repeated and pervasive written, verbal or electronic expression, physical act or gesture, or a pattern thereof, that is intended to cause distress upon one or more students” on school properties or at school events.

Bullying can include “hazing, harassment, intimidation or menacing acts,” the state statute says.

All schools are required to train teachers, staff and students on how to recognize and report bullying, and how to resolve and even prevent bullying.

“During the first couple weeks of school I held assemblies about bullying that were age-specific,” said Dennis Roch, a New Mexico state representative and Logan Municipal Schools superintendent.

Roch said during the assemblies, he stressed why children should not engage in bullying. Bystanders to acts of bullying, he said, are part of the problem if they do nothing to try to stop it.

“I encouraged the students to not be by-standers but to be ‘up-standers’ and stand up for someone who they see is being bullied,” Roch said.

Roch said he has made sure to include cyber-bullying in talks to the children. He said there have also been posters placed in school hallways discouraging bullying and promoting student cooperation.

“So far this message has worked well with the children,” Roch said. “I have seen students stand up for another student in front of their peers.”

Roch said the assemblies and displays in hallways and classrooms have helped students make the right decisions on and off campus.

The Portales school system has made bullying education part of the health curriculum, starting in the elementary schools, said David VanWettering, assistant superintendent.

VanWettering said school counselors are showing students how to interact with other kids and display proper behavior.

“Our health teachers and counselors teach the kids how to recognize bullying and how to stand up to it,” he said. “The most powerful way to combat bullying is for bystanders to stand up.”

VanWettering said counselors visit with small groups of students who have bullied others or have been bullied to show them how to deal with issues in a positive manner. These efforts help, he said, but they do not eliminate bullying.

The program “has been successful in helping us to better recognize bullying and give us the proper training and tools to deal with it,” VanWettering said.

Teachers have also received training to identify bullying and what to do if they find it.

Jay Brady, principal at Clovis’ Marshall Middle School, said there are three roles in bullying: the aggressor, the victim and bystanders. The middle school’s bullying programs, he said, educate students in recognizing the roles involved in the bullying cycle.

Brady said many bullies were once bullied themselves, and they in turn become bullies.

“It is this cycle that we are working to reduce with our counseling and anti-bullying programs,” he said.

Brady’s program includes rap and poster contests, an anti-bullying T-shirt design contest and even anti-bullying skits and infomercials produced in the school’s own TV studio, which are then broadcast throughout the school.

Contest winners receive recognition at a spring assembly, Brady said, and T-shirts with the winning design are distributed to students, faculty and staff.

“We teach character development and stress that physical and emotional harm is not OK,” he said.

If the students see someone being harmed in such a way, he instructs them to report it immediately, he said.

“We want the children to be kind and courteous, but we also want them to know what is and isn’t bullying,” he said.

Brady said kids sometimes mistake someone joking around with a friend as bullying.

“We want to educate the kids to be able to identify bullying when it occurs, so they can report it to a teacher or counselor,” Brady said.

The school investigates every report of bullying, he said. If an incident is determined to involve bullying, school staff will counsel the kids and, if policy warrants it, take disciplinary action.

“We know we can’t eliminate bullying completely but we can reduce it so that a student will feel safe and happy when coming to school, and that’s the way it should be,” Brady said.