One day earlier in the school year, a mother said her unidentified Evergreen Elementary School student came home with a concussion, a bloody nose, a split lip, and a sprained ankle.
He had been bullied by older students off school grounds, he told his mother. His assailants had repeatedly banged his head against the ground, causing the concussion, she said. The student and his mother went to the hospital, where he was briefly treated, and then released, his mother said. Middle school students may have been involved (that later turned out not to be the case, school officials and the mother said). The most likely culprits were older students at the school, who – when the mother went to pick him up one day – threatened to kill her son and made obscene gestures, she said.
She says she called superintendent Rich Rhodes, who tried to set up a conference among the parents, only to be told that the parents of the bullies didn’t believe what school officials were saying about their children. Principal Deidre Jenson later took steps to address the problem, particularly at recess, where students would sometimes pull the student out of sight of monitors to intimidate or harass her son, the mother said.
Next, the child’s mother claims to have gone to the police. An officer told her the matter was “out of their jurisdiction.”
Police declined specific comment about the issue in question, other than to reaffirm the judgment of the officer. The issues concerning any violence involving two minors can be complicated, said Lt. Merlin Ehlers, a department spokesman. Wrangell lacks a dedicated juvenile justice court meaning travel is involved with all youth cases, he noted.
“There’s an age factor involved,” he said. “We definitely have issues because of the distance of the juvenile services to our town. It’s not something the state can fund or make happen because you don’t have the workload. Our ability to take care of them is sometimes limited.”
It can be difficult for police to determine the aggressor in a bullying situation because of their sometimes-more-distant relationship with students, Ehlers said. Educators, who have a daily relationship with their pupils, are often a better fit, Ehlers said.
“They know the kids more than we do,” he said. “The school has counselors and the ability to monitor the situation. There is an age factor. It’s a combination of issues.”
“It’s not a quick fix,” he added.
Things were getting worse, the mother said. The mother and son – the Sentinel has declined to identify either publicly, to avoid exacerbating the situation – engaged in a daily battle to go to school.
“He was always upset, he was saying he wished he was dead,” the mother said. “I have to fight with him every morning to get him to go to school.”
The assailants were also choosing other venues for their attacks, leading passersby to intervene on at least one occasion far from school.
Finally, the victim’s grandmother contacted the Sentinel. A Sentinel reporter took down her account of the situation, and directed the mother to school board members. A few weeks later, school officials offered the mother the opportunity to look at school pictures (which is how officials ruled out the involvement of middle school students) and identify her son’s assailants. The Sentinel has withheld reporting on the issue in order to give school officials a chance to resolve the issue before discussing it publicly. Since her initial contact with the Sentinel in early March, school officials at all levels have worked hard to deal with the situation, she said.
“They’re helping me to get to the bottom of what happened,” she said.
School officials also declined to comment on or confirm specific details of the unnamed mother’s case, saying to do so would violate educational privacy law.
Other parents have withdrawn their students over bullying, the mother said. Statistics suggest the mother and her son’s experience aren’t unique.
A 2007 national survey found that 49 percent of students in grades 4 - 12 experience bullying at some point during that period, according to http://www.stopbullying.gov, a resource website run by the US Department of Health and Human Services. Eliminating the possibility for bullying may ultimately prove impossible, said secondary school principal Monty Buness, who served this week as acting superintendent while Rich Rhodes was traveling.
“I don’t think you’d find any administrator in the nation that would say ‘No we don’t have any of that at our school,’” Buness said.
At the same time, educators work to reduce and eliminate bullying both on-campus and off-campus.
“There’s a lot of reaching out,” he said. “The days of just ‘boys will be boys’ is really kind of gone. We have to address everything that happens.”
“As an administrator, I view my role as I’m still responsible for those kids going back and forth to their homes as well,” he added. “There may be a limit to how I can deal consequentially with some of these kids, but that doesn’t mean I can’t have them in my office and try to appeal to their sense of honor or right-and-wrong. It’s not ‘he’s a 100 yards down the road – it’s not my fault.’ I have never operated that way.”
Quantifying the scope of any potential bullying at the school system – mentioned obliquely during at least two school board meetings – has proven difficult. It is also difficult to say whether the behavior issue at Evergreen is better or worse than other schools in Southeast Alaska, or even the country, Jenson said.
While schoolyard bullies are still a part of everyday school life, school officials say no level of bullying is acceptable, Jenson said.
“One would be foolish to say there is no bullying at Evergreen Elementary; there is at every school in America,” she wrote, in an e-mail. “One would also be foolish to say that, just because it occurs in every school, we should just accept bullying as the norm and teach our students to deal with it. That is not the norm, nor the goal at Evergreen. Each allegation of bullying is investigated and responded to with the intent of reaching our desired goals.”
She acknowledged the school is dealing with behavior issues, but said they were normal.
“Where Evergreen has some current behavioral concerns, it is important to note that every year there are, just to varying degrees,” she wrote. “Appropriate behavior is a skill that needs to be taught, like reading, writing or math.”
Students will inevitably possess different skill levels, Jenson wrote.
The school has in the past employed socialization and character education programs like Second Step as a means to character education, and partnered with Alaska Island Community Services to provide counseling services for students who find themselves the victims of bullies, Jenson wrote. Since Jenson started as the interim principal in January, the school has also implemented a character education program referred to as “Six Pillars,” based around the concept of recognizing and rewarding positive behaviors. The program is constructed around six core virtues: trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring and citizenship. The program also includes a Monday-morning assembly during which all students discuss birthdays, after-school activities, and reward good behavior with school-wide recognition.
School system figures record only what is known as the school’s transfer rate – the number of students withdrawn before the end of term — without recording the reasons why parents have withdrawn their students. For example, the transfer rate also includes students withdrawn early to work on family fishing boats, and students who relocate because of changes in their parents’ career or other relocations, school system officials said. Enrollment figures are also based not on bodies, but on equivalent rates and correspondence courses, and figures for the present school year won’t be calculated until after the completion of the term, said Kim Powell, the school system’s administrative assistant. Figures for the last two years show a largely stable student population. Enrollment figures provided by the school system show 14 students transferred out of the school system between 2011 and 2012. Six of those transfers came from Evergreen Elementary.
Surveys conducted with students at Wrangell High and Stikine Middle schools consistently rank those two schools highly for school security, Buness said. The school system has recently concluded campaigns aimed at raising awareness of the issue surrounding bullying, and worked to prevent them, Buness said. As recently as January, the school board reviewed the school system policy on bullying.
Beyond calculating the figures related to bullying, defining bullying or distinguishing it from other forms of school violence or even the sometimes inadvertently rough-edged school world – say a one-time fist fight or exclusion from peer groups – can be difficult, principals say.
“Not everything that people perceive as bullying is bullying,” he said.
For example, a baseball team requires nine players, and a tenth member wants to join the team, but there are no positions.
“The perception from that kid who wanted to be in the group but didn’t get in is that he was bullied,” Buness said. “The reality of that situation might be far different. Not every situation that comes across my desk that is reported to me as a bullying incident is a bullying incident.”
“As administrators, we’re put into the position where we have to delve into that incident and then deal with it on a case-by-case basis,” he added. “Even a fight isn’t necessarily bullying.”
Alaska statutes required every school system to have a policy in place by July 1, 2007. The Wrangell policy was enacted in May of that year.
“Bullying is a written, oral or physical act undertaken with the intent of threatening, intimidating, humiliating, harassing or frightening a person that a) physically harms a person or damages the person’s property; b) substantially interferes with a student’s education or a person’s job performance; c) is so severe, persistent or pervasive that it creates an intimidating or threatening educational or work environment; or d) substantially disrupts the orderly operation of a school,” according to Wrangell Public Schools policy BP-5131.43. “Bullying may include but is not limited to, conduct such as physical abuse, damage or theft of another’s property, exclusion from playground or school-related school activities, verbal taunts, name-calling, rumors, innuendoes, drawings, jokes, gestures, pranks and put-downs.”
A later section of the Wrangell policy deals with cyber-bullying, which isn’t required by Alaska Statutes.
The policy definition differs slightly from how principals engage with bullying, Jenson and Buness said. Educators typically use three factors to distinguish bullying from other forms of school behavior: history, persistence, and severity, Jenson said. Police use similar factors to distinguish incidents of domestic abuse from isolated spousal struggles, Ehlers said.
Unlike fighting for example, bullying is a “repeated, malicious intent to cause harm and create a position of power over someone,” she said.
Parents who know or suspect their child to be bullied have multiple options, Jenson said.
“The first step is probably to contact the teacher, or the supervisory people that were involved,” she said. “Ask questions of your child, too. Do some background investigation of your own.”
More resources are available at http://www.stopbullying.gov.
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