<p>This breaks my heart, and it also makes me wonder what’s wrong with the bullies. Are they mentally ill or sociopathic or both? What made them that way? Genetics or upbringing? And is it possible for them to be fixed?</p>
<p>Binx, I agree with you some teachers add to the problem.</p>
<p>How many more lives should be lost before cyber and school bullying are taking seriously.
It’s really scary that the bullying went on after the girl died. These girls need professional help.</p>
<p>Physicsmom, you’ve got the million dollar question-- it is SUCH a widespread phenomenon, I think it has to be bubbling out of the culture somehow. And so it has to be addressed in the schools (and in the towns). There was a wave of suicides of HS kids on Nantucket last year and they really got serious about bullying, community-wide. As Binx said, some teachers get caught up in the ‘popularity’ thing themselves…and families carry traditions of cruel ‘teasing’… ‘toughening kids up’ for the ‘real world’. When one can just as easily point kids toward compassion, and show how interdependence is essential in the ‘real world’. Ugh, just heartbreaking.</p>
<p>What I wish I’d really heard from this article is about parents of other students being in an uproar over this, even if their kids weren’t involved. However, I’m sure other kids are afraid of their parents speaking out and retribution.</p>
<p>This school needs an outsider (with no children at the school) to intervene and get this story more national attention than it is getting.</p>
<p>Where are the adults? Apparently there isn’t anyone in South Hadley worthy of the name.</p>
<p>As a teacher, and a parent of daughters, I feel I need to respond to annudamom. I’m sure that it is true that some, dare I say few, teachers behave in a way that encourages this “mean girl” mentality, as far as the teacher wanting to be “popular”. I have seen this once in my 24 years teaching. BUT, I do believe that school are a reflection of our own societal values and culture. In reality our culture promotes this type of attitude towards females in so many venues. Have you really given thought to the Victoria’s Secret commercials that promote perfect breasts for every female,the make up commercials where perfect skin, hair, eye lashes, lips etc are shoved the face of every kid watching TV. Not even going into the music, video, online culture. How can a teacher, or principal, change the climate of the school when our culture, including parents, are inundating our teens with this message? Beauty is power, perfection in appearance is the most important aspect of being female. It is the school’s responsiblity to create a climate of acceptance, tolerance and understanding for sure. But, it is challenging to fight the pop culture of our society, especially when it is promoted by parents.What about the PARENTS of these “mean girls”? What do you think the message is at their homes? In my D’s high school there were many girls who got plastic surgery (breast implants, nose job etc) for graduation, b-day. Many kids who automatically got a brand new car/SUV for their 16th b-day. And that allowed them to feel that they could judge, tease, bully, those who didn’t have all of these things. How are the teachers responsible for this? As a HS teacher I spend less than 5 hours a week with your child, I will influence as much as I can in that time. Every parents has a repsonsiblity from day one it spend time teaching, modeling and molding their own child into a caring and giving member of our society.</p>
<p>Sickening, absolutely sickening. The Mean Girls should be expelled.</p>
<p>They should publish the names of the mean girls. The internet is forever. They took away that beautiful girl’s future, this should have ramifications on their own futures. I’d love to see an adcom in three years google the names of these girls and reject them for their poor moral character and sociopathic tendencies.</p>
<p>As for our culture, H & I both dislike the reality show trend. The whole “voting someone off the island” mentality bothers us. Also, the whole thing of using you tube to show people’s embarrassing moments seems to foster this idea that it is amusing to humiliate people. There is a complete and total disrespect for human dignity. This is the world that these kids are growing up in and we wonder why this is epidemic.</p>
<p>^ Such a good point FallGirl. I have never liked these shows either, nor those videos…and had never really put it together as you did. This is so true! They really do embrace and encourage mean-spiritedness and social exclusion.</p>
<p>Having a daughter in the 7th grade, I hear about all kinds of bullying…a little too frequently.
Just yesterday , she came home with a story about a mean girl putting up a " I hate so and so " Fan page on Facebook with 27 members joining until the school caught wind of it. She told me a lot of the kids got into trouble, most of whom had their parents make them delete their Facebooks…I would have hit the roof if she had participated in any way, and she would have been in a lot of trouble with me , not to mention the school</p>
<p>I was bullied pretty badly in elementary and early middle school, but even then, I feel that the kids did know that what they were doing was wrong. I’m even friends with one of them now, strangely enough. We visit each other from different states and laugh about how strange kids can be. But the girls in this situation don’t seem to feel bad at all. I did it unfathomable. Are they really all sociopaths, or what??</p>
<p>I think that all of the posters have good points. I am a teacher and I believe wholeheartedly that the schools have the responsibility to keep children safe at school, both physically and emotionally safe. Bullying should be prevented as much as possible through character education and bullies should be dealt with by maintaining strict and consistent consequences.</p>
<p>But as a teacher (and a parent) I see so many circumstances in which parents do not want to hold their own child accountable for their actions. When a principal or teacher calls to communicate a situation to a parent they are often met with disbelief and skepticism about the child’s involvement. It is always the other child’s fault. Or excuses are made for the behavior. What ever happened to teaching our children to empathize? When did we all start believing that our own children were incapable of mean words or behaviors? I think that part of the problem is that we are raising our kids in a world where they are expected to commit to one activity after another. Families hardly ever see each other. The job of PARENTING gets pushed aside. By parenting I mean teaching. Teaching about other’s feelings, teaching expectations for behavior, enforcing consequences (sometimes repeatedly until they get the message). Active parenting is hard work. It is easier to just live in denial and expect that our kids are going to turn out fine. And when something goes wrong, blame the schools, fight their attempts to hold the child responsible and hope for the best.</p>
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<p>It’s not sad. It’s unmitigated evil, and I am angry neigh unto apoplexy. The “mean girls” responsible for this poor girl’s death should be punished in no uncertain terms. What makes me absolutely want to cry tears of anger is the way they continued to rag on the poor child even after they’d killed her—yes, killed her! As the author of the above quote said, there’s something terribly wrong with their souls, something they need society’s help in addressing. School systems nation-wide need to aggressively take the initiative in addressing the issue of bullying, and even more importantly, parents need to raise children to be respectful, if not compassionate human beings.</p>
<p>One thing I noticed with the latest episode of bullying at my daughter’s school was that it seemed like some of the kids joined in to try to make themselves seem more " cool " …I found out that my daughter’s best friend joined in on it, which really disappointed me…she is a girl with not a lot of confidence and has been very clingly with my daughter…I am not trying to make an excuse for her at all , but I can see how some kids just go along with the crowd, maybe out of fear that they could be next !</p>
<p>I agree with AnudduhMom wholeheartedly. I understand that the parents of the abusers are probably not cooperative people, but that doesn’t excuse the school from doing what they are supposed to do: protect the kids. I’m sorry they have stupid parents to deal with, but they have allowed bullying to get to this point, so they must deal with it.</p>
<p>No amount of plastic surgery, tv shows, pop culture, etc, gives a kid the power to abuse other kids. They have that power because adults are too wimpy to step in. </p>
<p>It seems that the only tool to fight this is threatening the schools with lawsuits. It’s very unfortunate, but I’d rather have the school hate me for beginning legal proceedings than to have my kid dead.</p>
<p>Boys do bully as well as girls. They just bully differently. S1 was always the “smart kid” in school, which made him an excellent target in elementary school. We had always taught him not to fight, and to stay out of trouble. As it turns out, that made him a very appealing target in elementary school.</p>
<p>My husband had had several conversations with the teachers and the principal of the school about this over the years, all to no avail.</p>
<p>A couple of boys bullied him for three years straight. The final straw for us was when he told us that one of the boys punched him in the stomach while waiting in line at school, with the teacher watching. When he said something to the teacher about it, S1 was chastised.</p>
<p>I credit my husband with finally putting a stop to it. He told S1 that the next time this happened, he should turn and hit the aggressor as hard as he possibly could. He also told S1 that he knew he would be sent to the principal’s office for it, and that S1 should request that his father be called immediately.</p>
<p>After telling S1 this, my husband proceeded to go to the school and tell the principal about the incident, and what he had instructed S1 to do. The principal was appalled and said, “we can’t have violence in our school.” HELLO, what had been going on for three years? The only difference was that it was our son on the receiving end of the violence. And in the last case there was no doubt the teacher actually witnessed the event. </p>
<p>It never happened again. I firmly believe that for the very first time, the principal and/or teachers actually warned the boys in question that they had to quit. I wasn’t a fan of the approach, but I have to say that it did work.</p>
<p>justamom, one of my fondest memories from elementary school was when a dad came to school with his son and stood by waiting for the inevitable bullying to begin. He then went up to the 2 bullies and read them the riot act, in an extremely loud voice. It was fabulous for the rest of us kids to see an adult tell these kids to stop or else there would be big trouble. And I’m happy to say that that was the end of the bullying.</p>
<p>vahevala in #26, since you addressed your remarks to me</p>
<p>“I’m sure that it is true that some, dare I say few, teachers behave in a way that encourages this “mean girl” mentality, as far as the teacher wanting to be “popular”. I have seen this once in my 24 years teaching.”</p>
<p>Really, well, lucky you. I assure you that I have seen this contemptible practice over and over in my 20+ years of having kids in various schools, public and private, in the U.S. and overseas. I wish I could say that a teacher’s wanting to be “cool” with the “cool” kids was confined to the neophyte, young teacher, but no, I have seen it among even veteran teachers – the teasing of the ‘outlier’ kid, listening to kids’ school gossip and passing it on, and allying with the ‘popular’ kids in the class. I even saw a teacher make a “special assistant” of a girl who was the chief bully in one of my kids’ classes – with the mistaken notion that that girl suffered from ‘poor self-esteem’.</p>
<p>“And that allowed them to feel that they could judge, tease, bully, those who didn’t have all of these things. How are the teachers responsible for this?”</p>
<p>Because you’re the proxy parent on duty. It’s as simple as that. These are KIDS we’re talking about. Their executive function is not fully developed, even if their bodies are. Even if some of these kids are 6 feet tall and look 25, when they open their mouths all sorts of illogical goo goo ga ga comes out. It is up to YOU to be in charge and if you can’t keep my kid safe, I expect you to be honest about it. School districts can cover themselves by saying “we cannot and do not protect your child’s safety and mental well-being while at school”. But they don’t do this – they pretend they have “zero tolerance for bullying” when in fact they just organize ineffectual ‘anti-bullying’ events (like the pointless assemblies at my D’s school). Look, bullies never recognize themselves as ‘Bullies’! Never! They need an authority figure to point a finger at their noses and say “Hey! Don’t say that – that’s unkind.” or “don’t do that, that’s bullying behavior”, but more often than not, the teacher is laughing along with the nasties in the class.</p>
<p>Even worse, teachers and principals will sometimes blame the kid who’s being bullied for being “different,” because being different in this country is an offense. When one of my kids was bullied in elementary school the principal actually told me “get him in sports”, okay! So – problem solved! (not)</p>
<p>Your mention of kids bullying due to abundance of plastic surgery, cars, etc. is a logical fallacy known as Causation = Correlation. I know a lot of kids who are materially wealthy who don’t bully, and I know a lot of schools where the bullies and victims are disadvantaged and material possessions don’t enter into the problem. The problem is the need to assert power over other people, however and for whatever reason.</p>
<p>“As a HS teacher I spend less than 5 hours a week with your child, I will influence as much as I can in that time.”
I assume you stand in the hall sometimes? When classes change, and kids are shoving and shouting at each other? I assume you go to the cafeteria sometimes? I assume you sometimes stand outside school for whatever reason?</p>
<p>You don’t need to spend vast amounts of time with the same kids – bullying, aggression, nasty comments happen all the time in a split second, between different kids at different times. Also, it’s interesting, even though teachers constantly say things like “I don’t have time, I only spend n amount of time…” they always seem to know the school gossip, no matter how big the school population. They know who is dating who, who the ‘problem’ kids are, etc. Would that they would use that knowledge to keep alert to vulnerable kids!</p>
<p>Of course that doesn’t apply to all teachers, just as we can’t assume all parents and teenagers have superficial ‘Victoria’s Secret’ values. There are wonderful teachers out there, who show leadership and don’t have boundaries issues (i.e., try to make pals out of the kids). But teachers, principals, and guidance staff need to deal with the bullying problem at schools honestly – and it needs to start long before high school.</p>
<p>I agree with AnuddahMom… In every single grade I was in, there were indeed teachers who allied with popular bullies. Of course, I doubt they or their colleagues would have agreed that this was the case.</p>