We attended the Parent Academy last Wednesday evening to learn a little more about how the Haverhill Public Schools keep our children safe during their days.  It was illuminating and I wish – as usual – that more parents cared enough to attend.  The seminar is free and babysitting as well as pizza for the kids is provided and parents get snacks and lots of information to take home.  Each presentation ends with drawings for YMCA youth and teen memberships.  There’s one Parent Academy left this school year about getting kids ready for summer and for next year.  Unless your child is a HHS Senior you really should attend April 28th at the Hunking School 5:45pm.

We learned about how bullying is handled within the system from Officer William Alvarado.  I’m not going to recreate the program but the three key statements I took away from his presentation were:

• Bullying isn’t something that only happens here in Haverhill.  I knew this but I hear a lot of people talk about the bullying issue as a reason they don’t want their kids in public school – bullies are everywhere.
• Parents need to follow through with prosecution when bullying gets out of control.  Too often all of the work done to build a case and get the bullying on record is wasted because parents won’t follow through.  The bullying then continues and this lack of follow through makes stopping it much harder the second time around.
• Children who bully often come from parents who bully.  I’ve said this before in another post on bullying but I want to reiterate it here.  We as a culture need to stand up to all bullies!

Donald Davoli spoke about our District Crisis Response Team and how they work with the individual school crisis response teams to plan for and manage crises.  While the team initially formed in response to the Columbine shooting – their definition of crisis handles any event which impacts the ability of the students to concentrate on learning.  Our crisis teams work on everything from the H1N1 problems of this school year to grief counseling, unauthorized people in the building, natural disaster and much more.  They also mentioned our District Crisis Team needs sponsors so if you or someone you know can initiate contact with a company in the crisis or medical field to sponsor some much needed supplies for the schools please let them know!

The rest of the presentation was broken down by grade level.  The Elementary, Middle and High School each had a presenter who spoke about how to be involved as a parent in your child’s school and in their life.  The main goals of this portion of the presentation seemed to be expressing what is appropriate and expected in each age range, how the schools handle problems at each age range, and how to stop problems at the root for each age range.

I thank the presenters for their hard work and I thank the DPC for continuing to sponsor these events despite the poor parent turnout.  I also thank the Haverhill YMCA for donating memberships to the DPC to provide door prizes for these events.

The children had another exciting evening with the babysitting staff used by the School Department.  This might sound sarcastic but they really enjoy going and playing and every time we’re on the way home they tell us how much fun they had, that they met new friends and that they are tired (their red cheeks attest to all of it!)

We parents were treated to a presentation by a very confident and well spoken sixth grader who talked about her participation in the VIP program and what she and her peers are doing to combat bullying.  She made great points about changing our culture so that bullying isn’t seen as cool and standing up for yourself and for others.  “Don’t be a silent bystander!”

The main presentation was given by Katie LeClerc.  She was young and tech savvy which was refreshing since I expected more technology bashing and instead she was helpful in encouraging parents to conquer their phobias and learn the technology to both help your children and themselves in keeping kids safe and being involved in what they are doing.  She also made the excellent point that kids under 13 had to lie to get a facebook account and therefore facebook really isn’t responsible for that.  She also made the point that when you put things on facebook they belong to facebook and aren’t really very private at all – even with your privacy settings maxed so please post accordingly.  Many colleges and companies will Google you or check your facebook profile as well – so if you don’t want your education or employment opportunities gimped please think before posting.  MsLeClerc encouraged parents to use the tools available to block options on their children’s phones and computers to stop text picture messages and inappropriate internet usage and to monitor what their children are doing online.  Essentially she recognizes parents need to be involved and informed regarding their children – how revolutionary!

There was the obligatory reference to the Sex Offender Website for our area.  I still think these websites create a false sense of security for parents.  Not all sex offenders are known.  Not all sex offenders are easily recognizable from their web profile.  Not everyone looking to hurt your kid is a sex offender.  Not all sex offenders register like they are supposed to.  Some folks forced to register on this website are just kids who made dumb choices regarding their teenage dating careers and really shouldn’t be lumped into the sex offender category.  And frankly, I’ve discussed this before, stranger abduction/abuse is a very low percentage of all abduction/abuse – you’re far more likely to be hurt by someone you know and trust than by some random criminal.  Its very sad but that’s the way it is.

We came home with some helpful handouts of mixed veracity.  The overwhelming sheets which made up the “Guide to Understanding Online Chat Acronyms” were somewhat helpful and somewhat laughable.  They were also somewhat inaccurate.  The problem with acronyms is that each place one chats online uses some basic universal acronyms and some dialectical variations.   Then they also padded the list with silly things like “BISFLATM” just to be all inclusive I guess.

Another handout with an article about fifth graders working to combat bullying was more interesting because it drove to the heart of the issue.  The technology is just another medium for bullying – stop the bullying at the root and there won’t be “cyber bullying.”  These kids were refreshingly honest and forthright.  All the typical tell your mom/teacher/bus driver stuff just gets the kids bullied harder in school.  Kids know this – so they are unlikely to report anything or they wait until its so out of control and they just can’t cope any longer.  Giving them real tools to use to diffuse bullying situations is much more helpful than turning kids into tattlers who just garner more of the bully’s ire!

A handy dandy glossary of internet related terms was provided.  I haven’t seen a BBS or a modem in a decade but who knows maybe they are still hot stuff somewhere?  I also noticed RSS was missing in their definitions despite the site who provides this educational material having a prominent link to their own RSS feed.  Also notably missing were Cookie and anything to do with tweeting.  Actually, in retrospect, nothing about Twitter ever came up despite that being related to texting and easier to follow by strangers than facebook.

The last handout is a Teen Internet Safety Study from 2006.  Mostly the study boils down to kids use and love the internet.  Kids think they are a lot more private and safe there than they really are.  Kids also know their parents don’t have a clue what they are doing online.  I’m not really surprised.  This is why the kid computer in our house is centrally located and monitored and we haven’t given our 8 year old a cell phone despite her entreaties that all her friends have one!  My hope is that when our children earn the privilege of a phone they will be more responsible with it than if they had just been handed it like a toy.  We also talk often about what a wonderful tool the phone is and how it can be misused much like other useful tools such as knives and automobiles and the internet.  Is it enough?  I don’t know but we work very hard to balance the lessons required to make our children into responsible and independent people with keeping them safe and happy.

Cyber-Bullying seems to be the new hype item to scare parents.  Just this weekend the Eagle Tribune published this article about some new legislature to combat the ever-growing cyber bullying happening in school.  The Hunking School is hosting an information session on how parents can recognize and prevent cyber bullying on March 22nd with Katelyn LeClerc.  The Parent Academy at the end of the month will cover cyber bullying in its “Safety and Security” presentation and School Committee Memeber Joe Bevilacqua asked for an agenda item at a meeting in February to discuss this growing problem.  And googling cyber-bullying brings up an almost endless list of links to places dedicated to stopping the epidemic.

Certainly text messaging and facebook are being used by kids to bully each other.  The problem isn’t with the text messaging or the facebook posts but with the bullying and the kids.  Take away the medium and you won’t alter the message!  When I went through middle school and high school there were no cellphones or internet but there was plenty of bullying.  Kids wrote notes and stuffed them in lockers, they wrote on each other’s lockers with markers, yelled at each other across the hallways, whispered in their friend’s ears and giggled or snickered at their victims or prank called people’s houses.  There was violence and depression and detention and not a lot of actual education about why this was bad – certainly it was treated by many as a right of passage to be bullied in school.  Unfortunately not much has changed in many respects except that the kids have flashier toys to perpetuate the bullying.

From the Eagle Tribune article: “Parents will have to realize that they’re responsible for their children’s actions, and if they’re learning this at home and the children bring it to school, there will be repercussions for that,” Murray said. this is as close as they come to the root of the problem.  Unfortunately, the parents who are the worst offenders – the ones who are just adult bullies – won’t suddenly have an epiphany and become responsible parents because they got a note from the school.  These parents will see this as just more persecution and either blame their child for bringing home unwanted attention or blame the victim for coming forward with a complaint.

Sadly, bullying isn’t looked at as a serious problem by most people.  This is evident in our media bias.  Think of the sit-coms and cartoons popular on TV and how many of them have a bully/victim dynamic as one of their main comedic elements.  Here is an article on bullying regarding the Drew Carey Show and this Tvtropes wikki on sitcom archetypes cites many other good examples.  Because the shows always place some kind of redeeming moment for the bully we’ve been desensitized into thinking all bullies aren’t all bad.

Look also at the double standard society uses to judge success for our children.  We expect our children to do well in school and go to college so they can have a successful career but we still call the top performing academic achievers “geeks” or “nerds” who are often “bookworms” and “teacher’s pets.”  We need to stop stigmatizing our children’s successes!

Then there is this pervasiveness in society whereby we can’t be content with our own lives without somehow disparaging someone else.  This need society possesses to keep up with the neighbors and to have everything bigger, better, newer has plunged the country into the worst recession in decades.  We’ve tied so much of our self worth up in what we have or wear or drive and we’ve passed that down to our children.  If their little classmates don’t have the right toys or designer clothes then they are somehow not worth being friends with and subsequently end up teased by their peers.  Already the need for conformity has hit my home – my Kindergartner and third grader are always asking for things because “everyone else in my class has them.”  I struggle to find a line between teaching them the values important to me and making them complete social pariahs at school.

Do I have the answers to this problem?  Not with the current societal conditions.  But I believe that everyone needs to take more personal responsibility for their decisions and actions and realize how much their children are watching and learning from them.  We also need to intervene on the behalf of children and other adults who are being bullied.  We need to stop putting our heads in the sand and pretending no one else’s problems effect us.  One major factor that allows bullies to continue their reign of terror is that not enough of their peers stand up to them and say enough is enough.  Bullying will only be reduced at the peer level or with parental involvement.  Laws won’t make bullies stop.  Giving the victims the support they need to stand up for themselves by standing up with them is the best start we can give this issue.