Battling bullying

Bullying and bullying behavior was brought to the forefront at Monday’s meeting of the Medford School Board.

Even before board members got a chance to review the annual bullying reports for each of the school district buildings, they heard from resident Duane Parkinson during public comment about his family’s ongoing experiences with bullying behaviors in the district.

Parkinson told board members that his son was punched on the elementary playground, in the same area of the playground where his older son was punched repeatedly five years ago. He said he was told then that the district did not have cameras to cover that area, and that now, five years later, they still don’t have cameras.

See MEDFORD on page 9 He said investigation is a critical part of the reporting process the district uses and questioned how the school could not have a camera there. He called on the school board to add a camera. “My kids will never benefit from it, but someone else will,” he said.

Parkinson went on to condemn the statistics the building administration would be reporting later in the meeting, noted that in situations such as with his son, there was no suspension given out so it would not fall under their statistics.

He called on the district to work with parents to develop a tracking metric for bullying. He went on to criticize the school district and administration on the handling of bullying complaints.

“Unfortunately kids just say and do mean things,” said Andy Guden, the high school assistant principal.

Guden said he has received seven formal reports this school year a couple coming in the past few weeks. He said these were “typical negative high school behavior” and that it is predominately non-physical but more name calling and emotional harm.

High School Principal Jill Lybert said one of the major steps that will be taken at both the high school and middle school in the coming school year will be to prohibit cellphone use. She said there is a tremendous amount of bullying that takes place through social media. She noted that she heard feedback from one student who supported a ban on cellphone use in the school noting it would be nice to be able to wear an outfit to school and not have someone post a picture of it making fun of them.

“There is a lot of pressure on social media for the kids,” Lybert said.

Lybert praised the school board for their support when issues have needed to be brought to the board level for a potential expulsion. “We never felt that much support in the past,” she said.

At the middle school, assistant principal Jodi Butler reported they had three bullying reports involving two grade levels and different children each time. She said the hardest part of middle school is distinguishing between are they being bullied or are they having a conflict.

“Kids are mean,” Butler said. The challenge with dealing with conflict is that because it is not repeated behavior it does not meet the criteria of being bullying. She said that regardless the staff works to address issues that are brought up including when someone is repeating actions with multiple individuals. She said they have had success in getting parent support to get behaviors to change.

Butler said she supported the efforts to get cellphone use out of the school, noting that when they have had to confiscate phones and keep them at the office, that Snapchat alerts are going off all day long on them.

Board member Don Everhard, a former elementary principal, agreed with the challenge of trying to quantify a behavior as being bullying when it might be something like a look one student is giving another.

Butler noted that going down the hallway between classes at the middle school there are often students who have unintentionally aggressive looks on their faces because they are dealing with their own things, and that other students react to these.

“Every year you have new kids and new kids do mean things,” Everhard said.

Board member Jodi Nuernberger, who led the effort to get the existing bullying reporting system in place, was suggested to lead a standing task force in the district to address bullying behaviors.

Elementary Assistant principal Richelle Crank-Woller reported that at the elementary level they had one completed report. She also went through the metrics they keep for the number of office referred and discipline reports filed. She said they encourage parents to fill out the reports. However, in many cases it was found to be conflict between individual students and not bullying. She also said that they have decided to add a camera at MAES to see an area of the playground that they couldn’t see as well.

She said the large majority of students are doing a great job in following expectations.