BULLYING DESTROYS lives and sometimes ends them. In one horrific example, 11-year-old Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover hanged himself last April, after classmates at his Springfield charter school ridiculed him for how he dressed.
Can anti-bullying laws stop that kind of tragedy? A new bill, sponsored by state Representative John Rogers and backed by the Anti-Defamation League, attempts to get at one underlying problem: the need for accountability. It requires school districts to report all bullying incidents and any discipline imposed.
The severity of the problem merits such close attention. “Bullying occurs in most schools,’’ said Rogers. “It is an accepted part of the education fabric. It doesn’t have to be that way, nor should it be that way.’’
The bill calls for Massachusetts to develop a model policy that addresses traditional bullying and cyber-bullying. That’s a good start.
But the bill also requires schools to document all cases of harassment, discrimination, intimidation, and bullying and report the consequences to the state. That raises some legitimate issues about process and enforcement. When does teasing officially turn into bullying? What if the reporting requirements are counterproductive, prompting schools to avoid classifying an incident as bullying? What good is a report on bullying, if it only joins legions of other reports on other insidious education problems?
If this bill does nothing more than force schools to produce one more report that no one reads or acts upon, it will indeed be a failure. But if it causes one teacher, principal, or parent to confront what looks like mindless teasing and try to stop it before it spirals out of control, then it is worth the burden of extra paperwork. A school should be a safe place for every student in it.
