The teacher came around the corner of the school and caught the Grade 9 boy flailing a stick at a group of older boys. The younger student was immediately suspended for two weeks for violence on the school grounds.
However, the teacher had jumped to conclusions, says an education department official.
Kevin Tunney said the older students had been taunting the younger one and had knocked off his glasses. He was waving the stick to keep them away while he tried to find his glasses on the ground.
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That is the trouble with zero tolerance policies, Tunney told a session on bullying at the National Congress on Rural Education held recently in Saskatoon. The context of situations isn’t always clear at first and bullying victims can be victimized a second time by the school administration.
“The message should be that we, the school, should always respond to bullying. It is not about kicking kids out of school.”
Tunney is one of the Saskatchewan officials trying to help the province’s school system develop an anti-bullying strategy. After a student in Canora, Sask., committed suicide this winter after being bullied, education minister Andrew Thompson promised the public that all schools would have such a policy by the end of June.
While it won’t be that soon, Tunney said each school division will be required to respond to a questionnaire the department is sending out this month.
Many schools have a code of behaviour to create “caring and respectful” environments. These codes teach kids that all are to be valued and that conflicts can be resolved. The addition of a bullying plan will ensure that the school is prepared to respond to a crisis and that all teachers, students and parents are aware they have a responsibility and must be involved in eliminating bullying behaviour.
Tunney defined bullying as a power imbalance repeated over time in which the bully intends to harm the victim. Often a pattern is built up and even when caught, the bully is not remorseful and tends to blame the victim for the mistreatment.
In contrast, normal conflicts between students usually involve accidental incidents between two people of equal power. After the incident, both often show remorse and mediation to resolve the issue usually works.
Research he cited shows that 20-35 percent of children report being involved in bullying and that it is generally underreported and done out of sight of teachers. Bullying peaks around age 12, but intimidation and harassment continue into high school.
Tunney said an anti-bullying policy is not enough. The school must regularly educate students and parents about it and put it into action so bullying is exposed and stopped. He suggested teachers might also want to consider tracking children who are at risk to become either bullies or victims.
In a related session, University of Saskatchewan nursing professor Lee Murray said suicide is the third leading cause of death among Canadian youths and that there has been an increase at the 10- to 14-year-old level.
Murray said suicide often comes at the end of an accumulation of problems for teens who feel helpless, hopeless and powerless. Suicide should be explained as a failure to get help rather than an answer to problems.
She suggested teachers could watch for kids whose grades suddenly slip, who don’t talk to their friends and isolate themselves. She said it is all right for a teacher to ask sad teens questions about events in their lives and whether they have a supportive adult they trust to whom they could talk.
Murray said adults don’t often realize the good they could do by getting close to a student, even if it is just for one teaching term or a coaching season. She said adults also tend to trivialize romance breakups that are quite painful to teens.
She said teens in rural schools face a particular burden in that depopulation has resulted in a limited number of peers.
“So you either do what the other kids are doing, out drinking, or you stay home with Mom and Dad.”
She told the story of a farm boy who made a plan to commit suicide. He had hidden a gun and bullets in the bush and one afternoon after school, when his parents were out, he went for the gun. But his dog followed him and the boy kept chasing the dog, trying to get it to leave him alone. He took it back to the house and locked it up but it kept barking and clawing at the windows.
At that moment the boy realized that the dog would miss him. He couldn’t shoot himself and when his parents came home, he told them what he had been planning.
