Lauren Taylor lost track of the number of meetings she said she’s had with officials from Montgomery Elementary School about her son and his bully.
She said the other student spat in her second-grader’s face and cornered him in a school bathroom already this year. She first reported the student to school officials two years ago when both boys were kindergartners, after her son came home saying another student was attacking him.
Yet DeKalb County’s Montgomery Elementary reported no instances of bullying during the last two school years, according to Georgia Department of Education records.
School districts say they’re cracking down on bullying, but for parents who see their children suffering, the statistics don’t always tell the story.
But those numbers don’t include her son’s bully, Taylor says. “My frustration is in order to protect our kids, we have to resort to copying the media onto emails and things.”
In the incident two years ago, Taylor said her son, who is not being named at her request, was moved to a different classroom. Since then, the incidents have escalated. One afternoon this fall, she said her son told her the student followed him into the lavatory, swiping at him from the bottom of a bathroom stall.
It’s gotten so bad Taylor filed a complaint with local law enforcement, alleging the school has done nothing about the matter.
“My son is so beaten down over this. He’s the one removed from his class, taken away from his friends.”
DeKalb County School District Superintendent Steve Green said through a spokesman that not every incident of bullying is classified as such, because some instances overlap with other infractions in the district’s Student Code of Conduct.
“Every allegation of bullying is taken seriously and is investigated,” he said. “The goal is to provide the most effective outcome for the students involved.”
Georgia Department of Education spokeswoman Meghan Frick said bullying, for the purposes of student records, is defined as “a pattern of behavior, which may include written, verbal, or physical acts, that is so severe, persistent, or pervasive as to have the effect of substantially interfering with a student’s education, threatening the educational environment, or causing substantial physical harm or visible bodily harm.”
School districts report incidents to the state where a student has been disciplined for bullying.
Regional and national programs such as the Anti-Defamation League’s No Place for Hate teach students to use their own voices when they see other students being bullied. More than a dozen DeKalb County schools are part of the program, said Allison Padilla-Goodman, The Anti-Defamation League’s Southeast region director. All the Atlanta Public Schools are part of the program, she said.
“Bullying just has such deep and long-lasting effects on students and the other students around them,” she said. “The victims of bullying have perhaps the deepest impact, but so do the students who are bystanders to it and aren’t doing anything about it.”
Kimberly Wright said it was bullying incidents that led her 8-year-old son to attempt to drown himself in a Peachcrest Elementary School classroom in early December, but she says district officials have done nothing to investigate her claims.
“The guidance counselor is a mandated reporter. Even the principal is a mandated reporter,” she said, meaning both should have reported misconduct allegations to authorities.
No one from the school interviewed her son, she said, but she received a letter from the district on Jan. 26 saying the investigation was closed.
“I told them if they didn’t get the situation under control, it would lead to something else,” she said. “We’ve been seeing a lot of this with these kids.
“Every child is not built to endure this kind of thing.”
For school districts, “The challenge is not just to connect the dots and say here’s what we did, because that’s the business of safety,” said R. Leslie Nichols, a former national vice president of child and club safety for the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. “On the other side of the equation is the culture of safety. What makes the culture change? What makes that behavior intolerable to everyone? What makes everyone involved hold the others accountable?”
Nichols, now a consultant based in LaGrange, helps develop child and youth safety and protection programs across the country. Practices that lessen bullying’s impact, he said, are better options.
“As we look at our own society, we want a kind of restorative justice,” he said. “We don’t want everybody who steps across the line to go to jail. That’s not going to drive the type of society we want.”
Bullying incidents in metro Atlanta schools in 2016
Atlanta Public Schools 269
Clayton County Schools 223
Cobb County Schools 119
DeKalb County Schools 737
Fulton County Schools 298
Gwinnett County Schools 276
Source: Georgia Department of Education
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