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closeCyber bullying is on the rise
Sumner School District has a number of programs to help prevent and deal with cyber bullying
Roxanne Cooke
Social networking Web sites may be a useful tool to stay in touch with friends, but they have created a bully of a problem for school districts.
Intimidation, harassment and threats between students online can quickly escalate and translate into disruption in school, said Ann Cook, Sumner School District spokeswoman.
“Increasingly, the bullying comes back to school,” Cook said. “Sometimes it’s in the form of a threat.”
It can be challenging and awkward to handle threats that occur outside of school — and with social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook blocked on district computers, the intimidation usually begins after school is out.
But those situations escalate quickly, Cook said, because the immediacy of the Internet means threats or harassment can happen quickly and without any face-to-face confrontation.
It’s now a state requirement to institute policy language that addresses cyber bullying, she said. The Sumner School District adopted its language a few years ago, and it includes “electronically transmitted” messages or images in the definition of “harassment, intimidation or bullying.”
With the policy in place, several Sumner School District schools have worked toward preventing and disciplining cyber bullying, especially at the middle school level.
“We take it very seriously,” said Laurie Dent, co-principal at Mountain View Middle School.
Dent said she has seen an increase in bullying and harassment because social networking provides greater avenues to harass. That, in turn, causes students to feel unsafe at school, which is not conducive to learning, she added.
Often, students who are harassed will bring in printouts of any threatening comments they’ve received via MySpace or Facebook, she said. School officials will investigate the situation, and discipline ranges in severity depending on the situation and the number of offenses by a particular student.
Long-term suspension of 11 to 90 days is a common disciplinary action for threats, Dent said. Short-term suspension is another option.
Programs in place at Sumner School District middle schools to handle bullying of all kinds include full-time campus safety officers and students trained as “natural helpers” to provide help and advice to their peers.
Another program can help parents become more clued-in about Internet safety — part-time parent involvement coordinators provide a liaison between parents and the school.
Information on Internet safety is the number one request from parents, said Marilee Hill Anderson, STARR project director. Now some schools in the district insert an Internet safety page into student handbooks.
For parents, Internet safety can be a huge learning curve, and many parents still don’t understand how social networking works, Dent said.
“It’s getting better but we have a long way to go,” she said. “It catches them by surprise.”
The district has a great opportunity to show students that the Internet is a powerful tool that can be utilized for good things — but it’s also important to teach students how to prevent bad things from happening by safeguarding information on the Web, Cook said.
“It’s not going to go away,” she said.