source 2
Paul Levy
Jan. 06–Since taking up a proposal to scrap its controversial sexual orientation Curriculum Policy, the Anoka-Hennepin school district has received 47 e-mails — most of them from other states and countries.
The e-mails have come from Connecticut and California, Seattle and Washington, D.C., even Colombia and Canada, district spokeswoman Mary Olson said on Thursday. Rolling Stone magazine called again this week to interview Superintendent Dennis Carlson for an upcoming story. In October, CNN’s Anderson Cooper interviewed four Anoka-Hennepin students about being bullied.
“It’s a local community issue that’s playing out on a national level,” Carlson said.
The curriculum policy, often called the “neutrality policy,” requires staff members to remain neutral on issues involving sexual orientation. Critics say the policy does not protect students from bullying about their sexual orientation, real or perceived, and a lawsuit seeks its repeal.
At its Dec. 12 meeting, the school board heard broad criticism about a proposed replacement, the Controversial Topics Curriculum Policy, which says discussion of controversial topics in class is helpful but dictates that staff members not take sides. There is no mention of sexual orientation or any other specific issue.
The Term Paper on Sexual Orientation As A Protected Class
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has been arguably one of the most historic pieces of legislation to shape employment law in modern times. While it offers protection to employees on the basis of race, age, sex, religion, disability, and national origin, it does highly contested, controversial, and present subject in political and social progressive dialogues in recent years. The federal ...
The proposal could be voted on at the board’s Jan. 23 meeting, but no vote will take place Monday, the district decided this week.
Much of the latest stir centers on the word “controversial.” Several community members have asked what is considered “controversial,” Olson said. Others have asked whether being gay is considered controversial, she said.
“A few said the proposed policy is unclear or vague,” Olson said. “An equal number said we should keep our current sexual-orientation policy.”
But the opinions aren’t only from within the district.
National magnifying glass
While 47 e-mails hardly compare with the thousands the district has received in the past two years, “47 is still a huge number,” said Scott Wenzel, who has been on the school board nearly 16 years. And it’s far more than the “virtually no comment” the school district received in 2009 when it enacted its current Sexual Orientation Curriculum Policy, Olson said.
Said Wenzel: “I’ve seen more e-mails wanting to get rid of the current policy from people outside the district, and I mean far outside the school district.”
“From within the school district, I think we get a pretty even split, but around the country [Anoka-Hennepin] has become a huge social issue,” he said.
The national magnifying glass is likely to inch closer to Anoka-Hennepin, as it did with the CNN interviews in the fall and the magazine article for which Rolling Stone has spent weeks conducting interviews, including talks with Carlson and Wenzel, both said.
“As superintendent, my only concern is keeping our 38,000 kids safe,” Carlson said. “To assume we are uncaring or unresponsive to bullying and harassment is ludicrous.
Levy, Paul. “Anoka-Hennepin School District being watched from afar.” Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN) 06 Jan. 2012: Points of View Reference Center. Web. 30 Jan. 2014.
source 3
At around 7:30 A.M. on Feb. 27, a 17-year-old named T.J. Lane allegedly walked into a high school outside Cleveland with a .22 Ruger handgun. The shooter chose the Chardon High School cafeteria to begin his attack and got off 10 rounds. Police say he managed to hit five students. Three are dead.
Bullying in the Schools
Bullying and intimidation are a major social problem in many cultures. Since it is widely considered immature and mean to perpetrate violent or threatening acts, it is not surprising that incidents of bullying are usually found among young people where they gather to socialize. Schools are a hotbed of bullying activity, and many children are victimized. Bullying has two key components: repeated ...
Motives for the killings remain a mystery–the local prosecutor says Lane chose his victims at random, but a fellow student suggested that one victim may have been dating a girl Lane had courted. Yet even as police worked to secure the crime scene, one word quickly attached to the unfolding drama: bullying. Early reports described Lane as a “bullied outcast.” Anguished callers to local radio stations decried bullying. The day after the shooting, reporters at the White House asked President Obama’s chief spokesman whether bullying had caused the crime. The spokesman demurred, but the idea stuck: a bullied kid had struck back.
As more details emerged, the story shifted. Lane, a well-built kid who had a group of friends and a lively Facebook account, didn’t look like a classic victim. What is clear is that he survived a rough childhood. His parents were both arrested for domestic violence, and his father served time in prison for assault. Lane was living with his grandparents when he was arrested. He will almost certainly be charged as an adult, and brutal truths will emerge. But for now, Lane seems like both a bully–he shot five kids–and a victim.
Approximately 400 miles from Chardon, in a New Brunswick, N.J., courtroom, bullying also became the focus of a trial that began a week before the Ohio shootings. Dharun Ravi is accused of having so viciously tormented his Rutgers University roommate, a gay 18-year-old named Tyler Clementi, that in September 2010, Clementi leaped to his death from the George Washington Bridge. Partly because of the bridge’s proximity to the nation’s media capital and partly because of Clementi’s gut-wrenching Facebook sign-off–“jumping off the gw bridge sorry”–the case ignited a furor over bullying that swept the tragedy from a local to an international story.
Details of the Clementi case show that it too is more nuanced than was initially reported. No one disputes that Ravi secretly set up a webcam to spy on Clementi after the latter asked to have their room to himself. No one disputes that Ravi watched as Clementi kissed another man, tweeted crudely that Clementi was gay and allowed at least one friend to watch Clementi’s assignation. But in part because Ravi never posted the webcam video online, prosecutors are struggling to prove their case that he is guilty of “bias intimidation.” The same day that Lane was shooting in Ohio, one of the New Jersey prosecutor’s star witnesses, a friend of Ravi’s, declined on the stand to testify that Ravi was biased against gays. In short, what began as a clear-cut case of bullying has led to a muddle that looks like a roommate dispute gone terribly wrong. Clementi was already out to his parents and others; he and Ravi both instant-messaged foolish and brutish things about each other. After the webcam incident, Clementi initially dismissed it: “he just like took a five sec peep lol,” he IM’d a friend. The suicide came three days later.
Conflict Issue Paper- Bullying
ntroduction It started out with people calling me names, and then it got worse. They threw things at me, they vandalized my house and they sang nasty songs about me in hallways and classrooms. It got so bad that I felt like I was in danger physically. -Erika Harold, Miss America 2003 (Pollock, 2006, p. 1) Bullying is recognized as a widespread problem in the United States, and no one is exempt. It ...
The Bullying Conundrum
Very little about bullying conforms to popular belief. Not all that long ago, it was dismissed as an unfortunate rite of childhood. But because of high-profile cases like the Clementi tragedy and the 2010 suicide of Phoebe Prince, a Massachusetts girl, bullying has become cemented in public opinion as a growing epidemic. Measures rushed into place following these tragedies reinforce the sense of a spreading plague: today only two states, Montana and South Dakota, lack antibullying laws, and the White House has staged two antibullying conferences. The President has called on school districts to adopt antibullying policies, and his chief civil rights litigator, Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez, thundered at the second conference that “we’re sailing into an undeniable headwind of intolerance.” So when the news of a teen gunman in Ohio broke, it was easy for many to jump to the conclusion that bullying had claimed more victims.
But as painful as bullying can be, and as horrible as its victims’ scars may be, research suggests that the talk of an epidemic may be exaggerated. At the same time, some of the supposed remedies swiftly implemented in response to tragedies like Clementi’s are having unintended consequences. Some teachers feel forced to escalate routine playground spats into cases to present before school boards. And while tough sanctions against accused bullies are now everywhere, educators are divided on how effective they are at actually helping kids.
The Term Paper on School Shootings Students Violence Schools
Georgia, Colorado, Virginia, Oregon, Michigan, and Tennessee are the sites in which some of the most viscous school crimes have occurred. In this day and age it seems as if school isn't a safe haven for America's children anymore. School shootings are on the rise more than ever in today's society with kids as young as 9 years old committing these gruesome crimes against their classmates and ...
Statistics showing that bullying is a growing problem are contradictory at best. The U.S. Department of Justice has reported that 37% of students don’t feel safe at school because of bullying. That figure, while disturbing, has remained stable over decades. And despite fears that cyberbullying via Facebook and Formspring has exploded, the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ most recent figures, from 2007, show that only 3.9% of bullied students say they were bullied outside school grounds.
Other numbers suggest that many students are both victims and victimizers. In a survey of 43,000 high school students completed in 2010, the Josephson Institute’s Center for Youth Ethics found that 47% had “been bullied, teased or taunted” at school but that 50% had been bullies themselves. This suggests a lot of overlap between the two groups, meaning that the world isn’t cleanly divided into bullies and victims. Psychologists have long known that those who are brutalized are more likely to strike back than mere bystanders. It’s not always easy for a teacher busy in the classroom to distinguish the bullied from the tormented.
What’s more, the zeal to stop bullies has resulted in vague statutes that have collided with the law of unintended consequences. In one notorious incident in New Jersey–whose stringent law requires any school employee, even a bus driver, to report any possible bullying incident within hours to a designated official who informs the school board–the parents of a kid at Benjamin Franklin Middle School who called a fellow student a “retard” had to meet with school officials. Because of the antibullying law, the boy’s insult had to be filed with the state’s education department. If in a few years he applies to a state university, admissions officers will see the charge that he was a bully. “I think the new law crosses the line because it is trying to legislate good manners,” the superintendent of New Jersey’s Central Regional School District, Triantafillos Parlapanides, told his local paper, Bridgewater’s Courier News. “That is what parents are supposed to be teaching.”
The Essay on Impact Of U. S. Federal And State Compliance Laws
Impact of U. S. Federal and State Compliance Laws I would change the administrative passwords on all systems routinely, implement a firewall program with remote access control which will not allow, hackers entry to your company’s system. Without passwords being assigned to data and systems, this simply protection becomes a target for hackers. Identity theft occurs in some of the largest companies ...
The laws are costing schools even as recession-strapped states cut education budgets. Both for-profit and nonprofit companies offer antibullying packages that schools can adopt to meet the new legal expectations–for a fee. The largest antibullying company, the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program, charges thousands of dollars to large school districts that need to train educators to recognize and report warning signs of bullying, like repeated introverted behavior among possible victims. A common technique is to pair two kids who may have argued in the past and ask them to name something they like and something they dislike about the other person. Local firms have also entered the game. A New Jersey education consultancy, Strauss Esmay Associates, offers schools a $1,295-minimum deal that provides a two-hour video, three hours of training for two staff members and a manual on preventing bullying.
Other programs, like the San Francisco–based nonprofit No Bully, offer cheaper services, but the financial toll on schools is neither trivial nor clear. The U.S. Department of Education collects no statistics on how much schools are spending to prevent bullying, and the many antibullying companies that have emerged in recent years haven’t formed a trade group. Many officials have begun to fight the new rules. In January, New Jersey’s independent budget authority ruled 7 to 2 that the new antibullying legislation violates the state’s constitution because it provides no funding for local districts to meet its requirements, which include assigning an administrator who can initiate proceedings against alleged bullies within the required 24 hours. One township in rural Warren County, New Jersey, has claimed that the new law will cost $6,000 even though the township has only 427 students.
How to Fix the Problem
Amid unintended consequences and wasted funds, what can we do to stop bullying? Dr. Stuart Twemlow, co-author of Why School Antibullying Programs Don’t Work and a former Baylor College of Medicine professor, recommends targeting antibullying efforts at neither bullies nor victims but a third party: bystanders who watch bullying–either on Facebook or in the hallway–and either laugh or cringe but do nothing more. In a 2004 study of nine schools, Twemlow and a colleague found that schools that focus on punishing bullies and counseling victims report more violence than schools that engage bystanders–and their parents–in understanding that saying something about what you see isn’t always tattling.
The Essay on State Vs Federal Powers
The United States of America prides itself on it's democratic government, but the power of the federal government todays threatens American democracy. The Federal Government should grant states more powers to govern themselves. States' Rights, in United States history, advocated the strict limitation of the advantages of the federal government to those powers assigned to it in the Constitution of ...
Many educators on the front lines agree. One school administrator who deals regularly with new forms of bullying is Robin Lowe, principal of the biggest middle school in Houston: Pershing, home of the Pandas, of whom there are 1,750 on any given day. Lowe says that “probably once a week” she meets with a parent clutching a printout showing Facebook wall posts that degrade one of her students.
Most of the time, it turns out that the kids have been engaged in typical middle-school feuds over breakups or hallway slights. Lowe, who has been a principal in middle schools for 25 years, has found that bullying incidents are rarely simple cases of cool kids attacking outcasts. Once she starts poking around, she says, “I can guarantee you that no one is an innocent on any of this. Something has come before.” Many of the same parents who burst into her office with Facebook printouts later have to meet with her to see the aggressive Facebook posts their own kids have written. Lowe says “99.9%” of parents on both sides of alleged bullying incidents are shocked to realize what their kids have written. The best way to stop bullying, she says, is to get bystanders to step up: post a Facebook message telling both sides to calm down, or grab a teacher when students in a hallway are scrawling obscenities on lockers.
Lowe also says that although many argue that the digital era has escalated bullying, she disagrees. Just 20 years ago, a student might spray-paint “Whore” on a girl’s locker. That insult might stay up for days, to be seen by many students or be scrubbed instantly. Anonymous insults on Formspring aren’t so different: they can be deleted in a matter of seconds.
All of this argues for administrators and parents to take a deep breath and evaluate the scope of an incident before responding. Politically, the issue is a winner for both Democrats and Republicans. Democrats can please liberal donors outraged by the Clementi suicide, and Republicans can proclaim tolerance at little cost. In New Jersey, only one legislator voted against the tough antibullying law, and Governor Chris Christie signed it without hesitation.
No one who says the antibullying efforts are going to extremes would argue against kids’ learning to treat one another with respect. But exaggerating the “epidemic” is taking its own kind of toll. Bureaucratic procedures can’t substitute for teachers’ and parents’ showing kids that those who are bullied can become bullies themselves and that students can and should stand up for one another. Most of us are both bully and victim. Bullying may be seen as less a contagion than an unfortunate fact of childhood.
Cloud, John. “The Myths Of Bullying.” Time 179.10 (2012): 40. MAS Ultra – School Edition. Web. 30 Jan. 2014.
source 4
Chairman Harkin, Ranking Member Enzi, and Members of the
Committee:
I am pleased to be here today to discuss the results of the work that you
and other members of the committee requested on school bullying. It is
estimated that millions of American youths have been bullied by their
peers, including physical, verbal, and electronic attacks.1
x What is known about the prevalence of school bullying and its effects
on victims?
Some of these
incidents, including some where bullying has been linked by the media to
teen suicide, have received widespread attention, resulting in heightened
awareness of bullying, as well as a wide range of actions at the federal,
state, and local levels to address the behavior. Some of these incidents
involved bullying based on personal characteristics, including race,
religion, or sexual orientation, and have also raised questions about the
role and availability of federal and state civil rights protections. Given the
dynamic and rapidly changing nature of these efforts, governments at all
levels, as well as the public, face a growing need for information about
possible legal and practical approaches to combating bullying. My
statement is based on our report released yesterday, which addresses
the following objectives:
x What approaches are selected states and local school districts taking
to combat school bullying?
x What legal options do the federal and selected state governments
have in place when bullying leads to allegations of discrimination?
x How are key federal agencies coordinating their efforts to combat
school bullying? nongeneralizable sample of eight states and six school districts; and
reviewed selected relevant federal and state civil rights laws. More
information on our scope and methodology is available in the issued
report. 2
Although definitions vary, including definitions used by federal agencies,
many experts generally agree that bullying involves intent to cause harm,
accompanied by repetition, and an imbalance of power. Notably, bullying
is distinct from general conflict or aggression, which can occur absent an
imbalance of power or repetition. For example, a single fight between two
youths of roughly equal power is a form of aggression, but may not be
bullying. When bullying occurs, it may take many forms, including
physical harm, such as hitting, shoving, or locking someone inside a
school locker; verbal name calling, taunts, or threats; relational attacks,
such as spreading rumors or isolating victims from their peers; and the
use of computers or cell phones to convey harmful words or images, also
referred to as cyberbullying. Bullying often occurs without apparent
provocation and may be based on the victim’s personal characteristics.
For example, youth may be bullied based on the way they look, dress,
speak, or act. To address bullying, federal, state, and local governments
have a range of efforts under way, including studies of the prevalence of
bullying, laws to prevent and address bullying, and antidiscrimination laws
that, for certain stated classes of students, can be used in some
circumstances to address discrimination resulting from bullying.
We conducted our work on which this testimony is based from
April 2011 through May 2012 in accordance with generally accepted
government auditing standards.Although definitions vary, including definitions used by federal agencies,
many experts generally agree that bullying involves intent to cause harm,
accompanied by repetition, and an imbalance of power. Notably, bullying
is distinct from general conflict or aggression, which can occur absent an
imbalance of power or repetition. For example, a single fight between two
youths of roughly equal power is a form of aggression, but may not be
bullying. When bullying occurs, it may take many forms, including
physical harm, such as hitting, shoving, or locking someone inside a
school locker; verbal name calling, taunts, or threats; relational attacks,
such as spreading rumors or isolating victims from their peers; and the
use of computers or cell phones to convey harmful words or images, also
referred to as cyberbullying. Bullying often occurs without apparent
provocation and may be based on the victim’s personal characteristics.
For example, youth may be bullied based on the way they look, dress,
speak, or act. To address bullying, federal, state, and local governments
have a range of efforts under way, including studies of the prevalence of
bullying, laws to prevent and address bullying, and antidiscrimination laws
that, for certain stated classes of students, can be used in some
circumstances to address discrimination resulting from bullying.
