It happened again today. Another student came to me in tears. Kids were sending text messages to each other at home in the evenings. This student had been caught making a face by someone with a cell phone camera, and this picture was sent around to just about everyone in the 6th grade by today.
"How can I make them stop!!!?" the student wailed.
I thought back to the beginning of the school year when I made the decision to focus on technology literacy in my Technology classes. We have talked about internet safety, how to recognize websites that are helpful and those that are bogus when it comes to looking up information. We have talked about not sharing passwords and how once you say something or post something on the Internet, it is there forever.
We have had extensive conversations about their safety on Facebook--I told them I can view a lot of private information on many of their pages because they have not bothered to change their privacy settings to "Friends Only." Many had inappropriate pictures, posted with the confidence that comes with believing only a chosen few could see them.
Yet, the bullying continues. Sweet girls who are excellent students become unbelievable cruel as they determine the social worth of their classmates. This one's hair is "ugly." This one doesn't dress the right way. This one smells funny. They evaluate the "worthiness" of the person sitting next to them, or the person who stands along the wall during recess, unable to break out of their shyness.
Why are they so mean?
Now, parents are beginning to contact the school demanding that we "do something" about these activities that are happening at HOME over the weekend. Kids can't access any social networking sites at school, and cell phones are required to be turned off and kept in backpacks. At the elementary school level, teachers have no time in their harried and proscribed teaching schedules to spend a lot of time discussing this. However, as the teacher librarian and technology specialist, it fits quite well into my lessons, thus my decision to focus on tech. literacy this year. Our school social worker has been working with these kids since they were in 3rd grade on the evils of bullying and how to handle it. This happens in all our schools in this country.
In the fall, a student at one of the high schools committed suicide because he was bullied unmercifully because he was gay. None of the staff heard a thing about it, and his family did not know about the bullying..he was too scared to tell anyone, and no student was willing to come forward to help him out, probably for fear of being bullied as well. We discussed the suicide in my class with the 6th graders--many knew the boy and knew why he had killed himself. They were momentarily sobered, but that very afternoon I was handed a discipline slip ( I have my admin. credentials and do basic fact gathering to pass on to the administrator) that described how one of those very students had gone out and bullied a smaller student.
During recesses, we have 4 adults out on the playground at all times. The kids who are the "best" at bullying are masters at waiting until the split second an adult looks away to lean over and say something devastating to another child.
That said, our bullying problems are not so much at school as they are happening at home via Facebook, MySpace and texting. Not all parents are careful about their kids' technology time and are unaware of the power their kids possess.
So what can/should we do at school? Parents have been all over the board about how we handle this. Many express dismay and fear that it might happen TO their kids, but if their child is the one doing the bullying, or is standing around encouraging it from the sidelines, they are usually in denial. Now, those parents whose kids have been bullied over the internet or cellphones at home on weekends want us to intervene.
My question is, do parents really want us to be a part of how they discipline their kids at home? Are we responsible for the fight behind McDonalds on a Saturday night? More and more parents who are at the end of their rope are coming to us for help.
What do you think?