Pearl River      Maybe I’m wrong, but the recognition that bullying in school is a real issue has become a central focus for parents and educators now and that wasn’t the case when I was coming up.  Then it was “boys will be boys,” and advice that all bullies would back down, if you hit them in the face or at least stood up to them.  I’m not saying that either of those words of wisdom were true or false, but they were common.  Mainly, you kept it to yourself and worked it all out the best way you could, if you were in that situation.

Seeing bullying as a real issue that warrants response from parents and educators is a sign of progress, even if it seems we are a long way from solutions.  There are definitely people and organizations trying to do something about this, and I talked to one on Wade’s World recently.  Kirk Smalley and his wife started a nonprofit organization called Stand for the Silent after their 11-year-old son took his own life as a result of bullying.  In the last fourteen years, since they founded the organization in 2010, by his count they have been to 6025 schools and spoken with more than four million students.  Talking to Kirk, I learned that the organization is based in Stillwater, Oklahoma, not far from where Kirk lives.  They have chapters in a number of communities, but a lot of the concentration is in the Midwest in states like Illinois and Nebraska, although I caught up with him while he was speaking to schools in central Arkansas.

A lot of their strategy is based on getting schools to pay attention, intervene, and make a priority of creating a positive student environment that marginalizes bullies and allows kids to speak up and speak out.  I thought that teachers would be key to identifying and responding to bullying incidents, because they have their eyes on the kids more than anyone else.  Maybe that’s old school, playground and school yard thinking about bullying though?  Since Stand for the Silent focuses on partnering with schools and basing their chapters there, maybe they need to tread lightly around the role of teachers?  I don’t know.

More critical in Kirk’s view than schools are the role of parents.  He emphasized that theme repeatedly.  Where I was thinking of how to identify children being bullied, he was thinking preemptively about parents making sure their children didn’t become bullies.

Part of the sea change in bullying that makes this all hard is that most of the problem now is not rough stuff at recess and after school but social media.  Admittedly, that’s something schools are ill-equipped to monitor.  Kirk says there are effective tools that parents can use.  He and his people have also created something called the Social Bullet based on an algorithm that will send a “bullet” or warning when a certain level of negative social media postings hits.  Snapchat is the hardest to monitor for them, because the messages disappear so quickly.  They have also found that middle school is the biggest battleground against bullying, not high school, no matter how many times the “mean girls” franchise jumps back into the news.  Cellphones in the hands of even elementary school children can be dangerous weapons for fragile children.

This is a good fight that Kirk and his people are waging.  It’s good that this issue is now front and center in schools.  Sadly, it’s not clear that parents, schools, or children are winning yet.