School Bullying Council

CORNER BROOK  The Western School District has a lot of work ahead as it analyzes and acts on the results of a bullying survey completed in 65 of its schools.

Eugene May, education officer for student achievement and student support services with the Western School District, said the survey was a good exercise for the school board and helped identify areas of concern and suggested some ways of dealing with bullying issues.

Three versions of the online survey, one for students in Grades 4 to Level 3, one for staff and one for parents, were completed over the last couple of months.

May said some 85 per cent of students and roughly the same amount of staff completed the survey, along with some 1,600 parents.

The board will now take the results and use them to develop a district plan that will go into its district strategic plan for the next three years. Each school will also receive individualized results and will be asked to develop their own action plans. May said they’ll be asked to address the strengths identified in the survey and the challenges.

May said on the surface the results show the district did well with 85 per cent of students saying they felt comfortable and that there were people to support them. He said the percentages are reflective of national surveys.

May said there were quite a few things that came out of the surveys that surprised him.

One was that physical bullying ranked third among the types of bullying that respondents in all three surveys identified as having seen or experienced.

“Personally I thought it would be higher.”

The number one type of bullying was verbal, which included insults, teasing, taunting and name calling.

The board had anticipated seeing cyberbullying ranking high among the types of bullying but May said in the elementary level it was virtually non-existent and in Grades 7 to Level 3 it was ranked a distant fourth.

May said there are a lot of things that came out of the surveys that the board will develop strategies around but for him three things stood out.

He said the first is a need that came from parents and students for more education on what is bullying and how to report it.

The survey showed that 25 per cent of elementary students and 20 per cent of high school students “couldn’t tell us if they were being bullied or not. They were not sure.”

May also said that a quarter of the parents surveyed weren’t aware of how to report bullying.

“We need to do work with schools around providing schools with the information and training for making sure students are aware of what bullying is. Making sure that schools have processes in place that parents and students are aware of for reporting bullying.”

May said the board also has to make sure schools have processes in place to get information to parents.

The second thing May feels needs to be addressed is having the schools develop programs or plans of working with students to develop empathy for each other such that they’re willing to report bullying and willing to help out when they see someone being bullied. Half of those surveyed said they saw bullying but did nothing about it. The top reason being it was none of their business, followed by being afraid.

May considers this to be big challenge, but he said it has to be put out there that “we have responsibility for each other.”

The third area May feels needs to be addressed is to provide more support to classroom teachers.

He said overwhelmingly in the surveys among both elementary and high school students the classroom teacher was identified as the first person someone being bullied would seek help from.

May said the board will have its district strategic plan ready by the end of this school year with implementation beginning in September.

http://www.thewesternstar.com/News/Local/2011-05-01/article-2466984/May-surprised-by-results-of-bullying-survey/1

Maria Morrissey, sister of deceased literary journal editor Kevin Morrissey, will speak next week at a news conference in support of New York legislation on workplace bullying.

Morrissey committed suicide last summer. The incident prompted a wave of news coverage when some of his colleagues asserted that Morrissey had been verbally harassed by his boss at the Virginia Quarterly Review, editor and poet Ted Genoways.

Sister Maria has emerged as a sort of national spokesperson on workplace bullying, and it is in that capacity that she will speak Monday in support of the Healthy Workplace Bill in Albany, N.Y. She sent me a news release from the organization New York Healthy Workplace Advocates that lists her as one of three speakers, all giving personal accounts of alleged workplace bullying. A spokeswoman for New York Sen. Diane Savino, a Democrat and chief sponsor of the bill in that chamber, confirmed the Monday event.

Supporters and detractors of Genoways — who still runs the journal on the University of Virginia campus — remain divided on his role in the affair.

An internal investigation by the university faulted Genoways for “questionable” management and the university for weak oversight. It did not directly address whether the boss bore any responsibility in the death of his employee.

The report stated that “no specific allegations of bullying or harassment” reached university leaders before Morrissey’s death. Based on that statement and others, Lloyd Snook, Genoways’s attorney, concluded that the report did not support “accusations in the media that Ted Genoways was a bully — a conclusion with which we agree.”

At least one lengthy article on the case, in Slate, concluded that bullying wasn’t quite the right word for what had happened in the journal offices. It asked, “Did Genoways act with malice — the bar set even by the bullying advocates — or did he just act clumsily or unfeelingly? And does it make sense to use the bullying framework to look at dysfunctional work environments?”

Fellow writers rose to Genoways’s defense. But Morrissey’s siblings and much of the journal’s small staff supported the theory that the top editor bore some measure of blame.

Genoways himself, who has tracked public comments on the case by his former colleagues and U-Va. administrators, said in an e-mail today that some who spoke out against him last summer subsequently backed away from the “bullying” allegation, while others didn’t use the term in the first place: “No one with first-hand knowledge of events — not former staff, not university officials — now describes what happened as bullying,” he said.

Meanwhile, copies of the struggling journal’s Spring 2011 issue have sold out.

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This post has been updated since it was first published.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/college-inc/post/sister_of_deceased_journal_editor_to_speak_on_workplace_bullying/2011/04/29/AF6Kx1DF_blog.html?wprss=rss_education