I remember living in fear in third grade while growing up in a small town in Western Washington.
This one kid was big, and I’m not sure why, but every day he hunted me down and wanted to fight. I hated going to school during that short period.
Even at that young age I believed telling my dad and making a big fuss at school would just make it worse. Eventually it faded away.
A few years later in middle school, however, I had to walk to school and there were these two brothers — the Frito Brothers, sons of a single longshoreman. They were the baddest boys at school, and inevitably I would find myself in a headlock on the way to school or the few blocks back home in the afternoon.
In high school, I had a friend who won a chance to shoot a half-court shot at a SuperSonics basketball game. If he made it, he would get a new car. He swooshed the shot, and showed up the next week with a sky-blue Mercury Capri. It was a big deal. The school even held an assembly celebration.
Sometime that day, likely during the assembly, some of the ruffians of the school trashed his car while it was parked in the school lot, beating it with a baseball bat or tire iron.
This past week those not-so-cherished images of my past came back as I heard about a local bullying and car bashing incident.
A week and a half ago, on a Saturday, a Hockinson High School student had his car torched in front of his home.
He told a local television station that starting about a year ago, he has often been the target of bullying. He said it is common during a typical day to be harassed and threatened.
“I just hope that the school will do something about other people who are messing with people, being bullied online, social media, everything,” he told a KOIN TV reporter. “Just — they can do something about it. Better communications throughout the school, too.”
In a Facebook post, he said he is a senior at school, and has been going there since third grade. He said the police officer at his school “has been no help.”
I hope that is overstated and/or untrue, but the fact that he believes it means the system is failing him. Our students should find school as a safe place, a sanctuary, where the goal is to gain knowledge and improve, not one where intimidation and bullying takes place.
For school leaders, there is plenty of helpful materials for those who want to curb the level of bullying in your hallways. One such resource is the National Bullying Prevention Center website at www.pacer.org.
From that website comes the following statistics.
• 22 percent of students report being bullied during the school year
• 64 percent of children who were bullied did not report it
• 57 percent of bullying situations stop when a peer intervenes
• 25 percent is the amount that bullying drops when school-based bullying prevention programs are enacted
• The impacts of bullying on children are poor school adjustment, sleep difficulties, anxiety and depression
• Those doing the bullying have increased academic problems, substance abuse and violent behavior later in life
• Students who have been bullied said the best actions teachers can take are to listen, check back with the student to see if the bullying has stopped, and to offer advice
• Students who have been bullied said the worst actions teachers can take are to tell them to solve it themselves, tell them they need to act differently, ignoring the bullying is taking place, and to tell the students to quit being a tattle-tale
• Students who have been bullied said the most helpful action is peer support, over both teacher intervention and self-actions
My hope is that the incident in Hockinson will provoke a discussion on bullies and bullying, perhaps an assembly that engages the students and helps ease the level of bullying, and an awareness by fellow students that they can make the most difference in positive outcomes.
