Maine’s Best Practices in Bullying

and Harassment Prevention

A Guide for Schools and Communities

 

Maine Children’s Cabinet

“Working Together for Maine Children and Families”

170 State House Station

Augusta, Maine 04333-0170
Phone: 287-4349 Fax: 287-7233

 

Dear Superintendent, Principal, Guidance Counselor, Teacher, Parent, Community Member, and Youth:

 

This Best Practice Guide to Bullying and Harassment Prevention was developed in response to LD564 and with the leadership and insights of Representative Carol Grose.

 

“An Act to Amend the Student Code of Conduct”

 

Sec. 3. 20-A MRSA §1001, sub-§15, ¶H is enacted to read: H. Establish policies and procedures to address bullying, harassment and sexual harassment.

 

Pursuant to the request of the Joint Standing Committee on Education and Cultural Affairs, the Governor’s Children’s Cabinet’s Ad Hoc School and Community Climate Committee was charged with implementing the work defined under this comprehensive legislation.

 

This Guide is directly linked to Maine School Management Association’s Sample Policy and reflects the legal content related to Maine Revised Statutes, Title 20-A, section 1001, subsection 15 (Attached in Appendices).

The Climate Design Team for LD564 (Biographies listed in Appendices) donated their expertise and time over the past 12 months to bring Maine schools and communities this Guide offering specific, effective training and implementation strategies to assist Maine schools and communities in reducing bullying and harassment and its lasting trauma, thereby improving the academic, social, physical and emotional lives of Maine youth, while reducing school liability.

 

In addition, LD564 directs the Children’s Cabinet to provide initial workshop opportunities to better understand the key elements of effective bullying and harassment prevention and intervention outlined in this Guide.

 

Finally, the Department of Education will offer a free-online web-based tool starting in September 2006 and which includes the Guide, additional resources and training opportunities to support your work to reduce bullying and harassment in your community and schools.

 

Table of Contents

1 Overview: School Climate and School Culture 1 Through the Students’ Eyes ... 1

Climate ..................................................................................................... 2

Culture ..................................................................................................... 2

How Adults Respond ............................................................................... 3

Adults As Bullies ...................................................................................... 3

Consider Relationships .............................................................................. 4

Community Impact .................................................................................... 4

Policy At Large ......................................................................................... 4

2             Creating the Infrastructure for Best Practices Bullying and

Harrassment Prevention 6 Review and/or Enhance Polices .......................... 6

Assess the Climate of Your School or Organization ...................................... 6

Committee Logistics/Functioning................................................................ 7

Development of Rules/Sanctions/Positive Supports .................................... 7

Supervision Plan ....................................................................................... 8

Training and Professional Development ...................................................... 8

Implement Classroom Meetings ................................................................. 9

StaTh Discussion Groups .......................................................................... 9

Evaluation ................................................................................................ 9

3 Creating Safe, Fair, and Responsive Schools 10 Helping Youth Change Aggressive Behaviors  12 What’s the DiTherence Between Teasing, Bullying, and

Harrassment .......................................................................................... 16

Youth as Bully Prevention Leaders ........................................................... 17

4 Teacher to Parent Communication                                                                                                   19

5 Guidelines for EThective Discussions About Bullying 22 What Does Work?..... 24

What Actions can Bystanders Take? ....................................................... 24

What are Those Other Strategies? ............................................................ 25

How do We Help Bystanders Become Active? ........................................ 26

6 Appendices 36 Maine School Management Association Sample Policy . . . . 36 Reference List for LD564        41

Books, Articles ...................................................................................... 41

Curricular Materials ................................................................................ 44

Websites, DVD/Curriculum, On-line Resources ......................................... 45

LD564 Best Practice Guide Design Team .................................................. 48

Survey Tools ......................................................................................... 52

School climate is the key factor that determines whether young people will be bullied or not. After an overview of school climate and culture, we will present specific interventions to create a school climate that fosters positive school culture and encourages respect for all.

In the first few minutes of entering any school, you will develop a “feel” for the school. What you see on the walls will influence your feeling.

•

·    Are there displays of student work, pro-social slogans pasted everywhere, posters announcing upcoming community-building events?

Or are the walls devoid of student work and instead there is a poster with 15 rules of

•

conduct displayed?

Do each begin with the word, “Don’t”?

•

·    How you are greeted (or not) by students and adults in the hallway impacts your “feel” for the school.

Are they helpful and interested in whom you are and how to help you get where you

•

want?

Or do they walk by trying not to make eye contact?

•

This “feel” you develop is indicative of the school climate. Through the Students’ Eyes

A new student on his first day of classes walks into his homeroom, looks across the aisle and says to another student, “What’s this place like?” The other student proceeds to tell the new student who the nice teachers are, who the mean teachers are, areas of the school to avoid, which cliques are in power, what events are fun to attend, and what the sports program is like. He is describing the school culture to an outsider.

The strongest inThuence on how young people treat each other is the culture of the school.

School climate and school culture are two distinct but highly interrelated and interactive dimensions of school life.

Climate

School climate is created by the attitudes, beliefs, values, and norms that underlie the instructional practices, the level of academic achievement and the operation of a school. School climate is driven by how well and how fairly the adults in a school create, implement, model and enforce these attitudes, beliefs, values, and norms.

 

Climate is largely created by the adults in a school and has been
described as the “feel” of a school’s general atmosphere.

 

In schools with strong school climate the adults model behaviors that strengthen climate, such as learning student names and greeting them by name.

 

Adults showing a genuine concern for individual students and consistently reinforcing them positively and responding to negative behaviors in a respectful manner also strengthens the climate.

Culture

The product of good school climate is a strong school culture. School culture is “the way we do that here”. The “that” can reflect any attitude, belief, value, norm, procedure or routine including “how we do relationships at this school”. In a school with strong culture any staff or student will be able to explain and demonstrate “how we do that here”.

 

Culture and climate are aspects of an interactive system, in that changes in one produce changes in the other. For example, two schools can have the same stated rules, values and norms. However, the school cultures may be very different because of how the adults in these schools enact those rules, values, and norms. If, in one school, adults demonstrate that all students are valued and academic expectations are high, and the other school demonstrates a lack of caring and concern for some students, the school cultures will differ tremendously and have different effects on the respective school climates.

 

School culture feeds back to climate and climate to culture.
Climate is established by the actions of the adults and sets the
“tone or feel” of the school. Culture is how students and staTh
behave in the context of the climate created by the adults.

How Adults Respond

One example of how this is played out in many schools has to do with harassment. All schools have a policy forbidding sexual harassment by students. If a student reports harassment to one adult at school they may get a wide variety of responses from the adult including being told to, “Ignore it”, or “Tell them to stop”, or worse, “Boys will be boys”. Or, if they report to another adult they may get a swift, direct response including intervention with the perpetrator and protection for the victim from further abuse. Inconsistency or lack of staff response creates a climate of uncertainty and undermines trust between students and staff. This message is instilled in the school culture. Undermining trust affects the culture by creating a less dependable environment and less trust between students and staff.

 

Another example that is all too common in middle schools and high schools is differential behavior on the part of staff toward different subgroups or cliques of students. This is often exemplified by permissiveness on the part of staff toward athletes or other “preferred” students and lack of tolerance and rigid adherence to the “letter of the law” with less “valued” students.

 

This unfair treatment does not go unnoticed by students and

has a powerful detrimental eThect on school culture. It reinforces the belief that some students are more valued and privileged than others and its okay to treat less valued students unfairly.

 

As damaging to school climate as these examples are there is another adult behavior that is worse. That behavior is to not respond to obvious aggression. Whenever an adult in school walks past an obvious act of verbal or physical aggression and does not respond, three very clear messages are sent into the school environment. First, the targeted student is devalued as someone who does not deserve the protection of the adult. Second, the aggressor is given tacit approval by the unresponsive adult thereby empowering the aggressor even more. Third, any bystanders or witnesses to the event are made to feel that school is unsafe because the adults allow aggression and don’t protect the students. This lack of response on the part of adults destroys a positive school culture.

Adults As Bullies

The only thing worse than an unresponsive adult is a bullying adult. Adults bullying students is defined as a pattern of conduct, rooted in a power differential, that threatens, harms, humiliates, induces fear, or causes students substantial emotional distress.

 

Adults modeling this kind of behavior in school
create a climate of fear and disrespect.

It takes a whole school commitment to a set of common values, with a persistently vigilant and proactive staff, to prevent these dynamics from developing in the school climate or to correct them if they already exist.

Consider Relationships

At the heart of school culture are the relationships that exist in three specific domains: staff to staff, staff to student and student to student.

 

The nature and quality of these relationships deThnes the school culture and signiThcantly impacts school climate.

 

If any of these relationship domains are dysfunctional or negatively compromised by climatic issues, the impact reverberates throughout the entire culture of the school, negatively affecting the school climate. This negative cycle is self-perpetuating and requires proactive staff involvement to correct.

Community Impact

This process does not operate in a vacuum. It is part of a larger system that is impacted by (among other things) community norms, values, attitudes and beliefs. Community impact on school climate and culture cannot be left out of this equation.

 

When a community demonstrates that it values students and education, it can have a very positive effect on climate and culture in the school.

 

Likewise, when community values and norms differ from those of the adults in the building it creates dynamics that make it harder to produce a positive school climate.

 

Effective schools exert positive influences on student behavior despite conditions in the home, community, social status, gender, race, or ethnicity. This is the influence of positive school climate on school culture and is the responsibility of the adults. When this happens it actually has the potential to plant the seeds of cultural change back into the community because students from the school culture interact with the community culture when they are not in school.

Policy At Large

A part of the bigger picture is the influence of state and national politics on school climate and ultimately school culture. When there are legislatively imposed processes that many adults in school find intrusive and personally demeaning it affects their attitudes about working in education in negative ways. Attitudes drive behavior and in some cases may impact a person’s general demeanor and affect their relationships with other staff and students in negative ways that effect the school culture and climate simultaneously. It takes strong leadership to maintain a positive staff outlook in the face

of such impacts from outside of school.

 

It is important that we understand the interrelatedness of school climate and culture and their association to a larger system of positive and/or negative influences. None of this happens in isolation from other system dynamics. Strong school climate acts as a buffer between school culture and local, national and state cultural issues which could affect it. Just as school climate can buffer a school’s culture from negative community influences a community’s culture can protect the school climate from negative national and state influences.

 

The interrelatedness of these factors must be recognized and addressed in order to create eThective system’s interventions.

 

The rest of the material will address how to achieve a positive school climate and culture.

 

© Chuck Saufler, M.Ed., Lead Trainer, USM Bullying Prevention Education Program http://www.usm.maine.edu/law/mlce/bully.htm

In order to achieve a school or community culture in which attitudes, values, beliefs, and norms reflect and actively support academic, social, emotional and physical health and excellence thereby accomplishing the mission of the school or community organization in which youth are served, an infrastructure must be in place. Based on the research and practices of both state and national experts, the following elements should be included and executed:

Review and or Enhance Policies Strategies:

Ensure that sound school board policies are in place to address:

•

Bullying

0

0 Sexual Harassment

0 Harassment, including harassment based on race, color, sex (gender), sexual

orientation, disability, religion, ancestry, or national origin

School board policy is essential to your school system’s efforts to prevent bullying. Your board is elected to govern the school unit and its schools. It accomplishes this by adopting policy that sets goals, establishes direction, provides support and emphasizes accountability.

 

Maine law does not specifically define bullying. Definitions of bullying, some developed by researchers in the field and others by state legislatures attempting to address this issue, vary in their language and scope, but they typically reflect two common themes - repeated harmful acts and an imbalance of power between bullies and their victims. Bullying may be physical, verbal or psychological. Bullying includes, but is not limited to: assault, tripping, intimidation, demands for money, destruction or theft of property, destruction of another student’s work and pervasive taunting or name calling. Some behaviors that are otherwise prohibited by law, for example, sexual harassment, are also recognized as forms of bullying.

The determination whether particular conduct constitutes bullying requires reasonable consideration of the circumstances, which include the frequency of the behavior at issue, the location in which the behavior occurs, the ages and maturity of the students

involved, the activity or context in which the conduct occurs, and the nature and severity of the conduct.

Bullying, harassment and sexual harassment are not the only considerations in developing a safe and welcoming school climate. Teachers and school administrators should be supported in their efforts to set and enforce rules for civility, courtesy and/or responsible behavior in the classroom and the school environment.

Assess the Climate of Your School or Organization Strategies:

Survey your population - There are a number of bullying and climate surveys and

•

measurement tools you can access by reviewing the resource listing in this Guide/web site. In general, however, it is critical to understand the current behavioral and climate realities as perceived by both staff/adults and youth/students in order to know the impact of intentional and enhanced policy and programming efforts.

Committee Logistics/Functioning

Strategies:

Recruit and form a committee involving Administrators, Teachers, Non-Teaching

•

Staff, Parents, Students, and community coalition members that reflect the full range of school community’s diversity (e.g. gender, race, religious faiths, orientation, single parent, two-parent/family, foster parents);

Schedule regular monthly meetings for the committee;

•

·    Determine the logistics of future meetings of this group and the roles within the committee.

Determine how information/feedback will flow between the Coordinating

•

Committee and teachers and staff.

Development of Rules/Sanctions/Positive Supports

Strategies:

Formulate consistent and specific school rules against aggression, bullying, and

•

harassment and make them visible and available to all students and staff at the beginning of the school term;

·     Examine how rules fit in with the school’s existing behavior plan and support school’s goals;

·    Discuss ways to encourage and support positive behaviors and the positive actions of bystanders, both students and adult;

Discuss possible sanctions to use when bullying/harassment rules are violated.

Discuss general principles/criteria to use in applying sanctions to both adult and

•

youth incidents based on CLEAR differentiation of: Bullying

0

Sexual Harassment

0

·       Bias-based Harassment (Sexual orientation, race, disabilities, etc.) Gender

0

Age

0

·      Cultural Sensitivities

•    And other aggressive behaviors Ensure Youth and Staff

1. Know the differences between bullying, sexual harassment and bias-based harassment.

2. Be aware of the gender and age as factors in the frequency of bullying at different grade levels.

3. Understand that not all aggressive or hurtful behaviors are bullying, but may still constitute unacceptable conduct in the classroom or the school environment. Supervision Plan

Strategies:

Develop a supervision plan that reflects the needs of your school- that provides

•

increased supervision in locations where your school survey data indicates bullying is most prevalent. Possible locations for increased supervision might be hallways and stairwells, bus, playground, cafeteria, and in the classroom. Decide how this plan will be effectively communicated among all staff.

Training and Professional Development

Strategies:

Train staff about the roots of bullying and harassment, effective and ineffective

•

interventions, the school’s policies and plan, prevention strategies, and strategies for dealing with bullying incidents.

Develop mechanisms for informing all staff (including bus drivers, cafeteria workers,

•

etc., who may not be able to attend the staff training) about the Bullying/Harassment Prevention Program, updating them on activities, and soliciting their input into the school’s anti-bullying/harassment effort. (Consider working through your Coordinated School Health Team/Program).

Develop mechanisms for informing all parents about the Bullying Prevention

•

Program and involving them in planning and activities.

Discuss ways of involving students in planning efforts for Bullying Prevention

•

activities such as through a Gay Straight Alliance, Civil Rights Teams, Peer Leadership, etc.

Determine a means of informing all students early in the semester about the

•

Bullying/Harassment Prevention Program (e.g. Consider a school assembly, grade­wide meetings, school television, etc.)

Invite experts in the field of bullying/harassment prevention, gender, cultural

•

competency, hate crimes, etc. to work with both adults and youth. Use presentations that are designed to lead to action rather than just awareness.

(A list of Maine-based experts/presentations attached/linked)

•

Focus on bystander actions that can make a difference rather than on programs

•

that try to convince youth not to bully or that try to convince youth to stick up for themselves. Placing responsibility for making change onto the victim is unsafe and can cause further damage.

Implement Classroom Meetings

Strategies:

Implement regularly scheduled classroom discussions that relate to bullying and

•

harassment and its impact on student physical and emotional safety and health.

Staff Discussion Groups

Strategies:

Implement regularly scheduled staff discussion groups to discuss issues related to

•

bullying. Setting up a book study is one good structure for these discussions. Evaluation

Strategies:

Measure the Climate and student reports of bullying annually against where you

•

started and make adjustments as needed based on student and adult feedback to include parents and non-teaching staff. (Note: Please see resource listing for evaluation information).

Some materials were adopted from a variety of bullying and harassment resources such as Olweus, Schools Where Everyone Belong, and research from members of the LD564 Design Team.

Students at risk for bullying include those who “don’t fit in”, such as those who are or are perceived to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, or questioning, those who differ from the majority of their classmates with regard to race, ethnicity, or religion, those who have differing social or physical abilities, and those who are economically disadvantaged.

 

Students are more likely to feel safe and connected to their schools if the school reflects their realities, if they think that they are being treated fairly, and if they believe that teachers are supportive and approachable.

 

Yet too many published bully-prevention programs do not address how cultural norms and stereotypes differently impact children’s sense of safety and fairness, feelings of connectedness to school, and teacher support or approachability. If bullying is largely about the imbalance and abuse of power, educators need to move beyond targeting student-to-student bullying and appreciate the ways in which gender, race, class, sexual identity, religion and ability position some children as more powerful and privileged in schools than others. Schools can feel especially unsafe and unsupportive when informal norms and/or formal rules unwittingly enhance the power or advantage of some children and youth over others. Since students take their cues from the adults in the school and learn how to treat one another through school norms and rules, such inequities can have a direct effect on the degree and nature of school-based bullying.

 

Schools that are safe for all students:

Have an explicit commitment to social justice and teach, both formally and

•

informally, about the dynamics of power, privilege, and oppression that impact all students. Such a commitment is reflected in an inclusive curriculum that teaches critical thinking, and a school environment that encourages and supports the

development of active and effective student groups that reflect this commitment, such as Civil Rights teams and Gay/Straight Alliances.

·     Appreciate the social context of bullying and how power differences between cultural and social groups give rise to bullying behavior. For example, what looks like bullying from a white middle class student may be a sign of self-defense or survival in a hostile or unfair climate from a white working class student or a student of color. The behavior needs to be addressed in both cases, but the response must consider these differences in social and cultural realities.

Offer diversity training to all school staff to increase awareness of the differing needs

•

of students and appreciation of culturally different communication styles and social interactions.

Develop clear social norms and rules that respect all students and consistent

•

consequences and interventions that challenge staff and student homophobia, sexism, racism, and classism.

·     Provide opportunities for students to participate in the development of such school norms and rules and offer creative strategies for helping all students think critically and to feel safe, respected, supported, and comfortable approaching an adult with problems.

Educate staff about the motivations behind different forms of bullying, distinguishing

•

relational aggression (more often used by those with less power) from physical

forms of aggression, and help educators respond to indirect as well as direct forms of bullying.

Do not use bullying as a euphemism for sexism, racism, and homophobia and make

•

clear distinctions between bullying and illegal sexual or gender harassment, racial harassment, criminal hazing or assault. A gender neutral re-labeling of violence and victimization in schools (bullying) can undermine the rights of students to a school environment that is gender-safe by stripping victims of powerful legal rights and remedies, particularly federal law Title IX.

·      Educate staff about the role gender plays in bullying or harassing behavior and how gendered behavior varies with social and cultural context. For example, the ways boys across all social classes feel pressure to conform to a conventional form of masculinity that includes a need to define oneself as “not gay” or the ways middle class girls feel pressed to hide their anger and aggression to conform to conventionally feminine notions of nice girls, whereas working class girls are more likely to express their anger openly and directly.

•  Offer media literacy to staff and to students at every grade level. Children learn physical violence and relational aggression, as well as every form of “ism”, from media they watch and interact with. Just as they develop critical skills for interpreting the written word, so should they develop the skills to critically interpret the 3000 media images they confront daily. Moreover, bullying among girls can be motivated by competition over media ideals of beauty and female perfection.

·      Examine (through self-study) school practices that unwittingly support unfairness, competition, and divisiveness among students, such as the uneven distribution of resources, and eliminate or alter practices that privilege some students more than others.

Social class differences are often subtly exacerbated in school functions and

•