I am originally from Baltimore, MD. but presently reside in Red Lion, PA. I had to have my 13 yr old daughter released from the school system because they would not acknowledge that there was a problem in Dallastown School system.Her grades was on a rollercoaster then. She is presently homeschooled by Agora Cyber Charter School and has all A's in every subject since she left the school system in January 2010. What a New Years Present. I encourage parents to team up with those at home if they experience this problem. It can be done!! My daughter wanted to commit suicide, but now she is sound and very happy!!! Halleluia!!!

When I was in school, kids being bullied fought back. More often than not, the bullying stopped. I can't understand why these kids are resisting the bullying.

I choose the non-existant 5th option: occasional bullying, which is not dealt with by the administration.

Of course bullying is a problem in our schools. It is a problem in our culture. These kids are simply modeling the behavior they see most everyday in the community and on various media(read the post on this blog a few days ago titled "Human Gridlock" as an example). I regularly see parents in our building (a local middle school)exhibiting bullying behavior towards children (not always their own), towards teachers, and towards administrators, sometimes to the point where police have to be called. Bullying is a matter of lack of respect for others. This is a societal problem not likely to get better anytime soon. Where have our values gone?

This country is raising a generation of sissies! Teach you kid to stand up for himself or herself ..fight back for God's sake or at least make an effort to.
God help the kids when they grow into adulthood...what are there expectations going to be if every time, as a child, all they learned was to go crying to a parent or a teacher if someone bullied them.
You are teaching them to be victims!!!!
Kids have picked on other kids for 5,000 years and for the most part they all survived!
You're going about this issue all wrong.
I feel sorry for the picked on kids because they will end up being picked on all of their life and not have a clue about how to deal with it.

My child is bullied by kids from her school but they don't do it at school and do it in a way that the school administration claims they can't do anything about it and the authorities won't get involved. As a parent, it is infuriating to see this happen to my child and have no one willing to help us out.

Parent's don't "teach' their children to be victims. That is the most ignorant statement i have ever heard. Kids are bullied due to social issues, Phoebe Prince was bullied because she was, from Ireland, she was pretty and dated popular football players. Middle school and high school girls get very jealous and competitive when it comes to "teen" issues. It's good kids vs evil kids, parents don't teach their kids morals at all. administrators just don't want to get involved in family "issues".

@Parent....I cannot believe that you are so helpless. Why do you need someone to help you? Try helping yourself! Do you have any idea how to be a parent? Read a book..take a class but if you can't discover how to teach your child how to deal with bullies, how is your child EVER going to learn how to deal with the disappointments and hardships of adulthood? Your inability to deal with this issue, on your own, is perpetuating your child's insecurity and limiting his/her ability to deal with life.
I truly wish you well in the effort.

I think that bullying among girls takes a more insidious form than the more obvious bullying among boys. It may be more verbal than physical, and now girls can bully remotely with IMing and texting. I remember hearing from a friend about how a group of girls turned on her middle school age daughter. One said "I never liked you anyway"--although they had been part of the same tight group for years.

Hey Mike, you are a bully! Denial equals neanderthal. Guys like you make me sick. You get off blaming the victim and condone boorish behavior rationalizing it by claiming it makes people tougher. Rubbish. Stop justifying behavior that leads to criminality and the taker philosophy so many bullies exemplify later in life.

Bullying, it's part of life yes, but it should never be life ending!

I believe in standing up for ones self, but I also believe in walking away and reporting incidents when the situation calls for it. In this day and age it's difficult for children to stand to their attackers and not become a story on the evening news or in the morning paper, especially those with disabilities. It takes courage for these students to talk to adults, a lot of them fear retaliation. No one fights fair anymore, bullying is done in groups, the physical abuse is never carried out by just one person, and more often than not involves some kind of weapon. If you ask me the bigger "sissies" would be the bullies.

As parents, whether it be to the bully or the victim, we need to put forth a greater effort in ensuring the safety of our children is a priority, teach them to respect themselves and others, in hopes of one day lessening the severity of this problem. We can't depend on school administrators, the responsibility starts at home.

Bullying occurs quite a bit especially in so called great school systems like Howard County. Year after year, the administrators sweep it under the carpet. Defend oneself? Know a child that did that and when he decked the bully, the good kid got suspended too! This was after numerous, numerous warings to the school. Lovely Howard County....

We should not be so quick to judge. Unless you work in a school daily and have to deal EVERY single day with kids AND parents who are bullies, disrespectful to administrators, teachers and other students who are not their children, social ills that are systemic district and to the community that spill over into schools on a daily basis and school districts AND communities that allow this to happen, we need to be mindful of passing blame. Many times schools do the best they can with what they have to work with. Are there some schools who turn a blind eye - of course. However we cannot condemn an entire school or district for that matter until we know ALL the facts. Finally, I'm most upset about the fact that as supposedly concerned parents and members of the community, how come we don't hear about the positive things going on in our schools. We're so quick to jump on the negative aspects. And how many of these same people blaming administration and teachers for turning a blind eye are mentoring or volunteering in their child's school? Spend a week in a school and trust me you'll have a much better appreciation of what schools deal with on a daily basis. Just wondering.

It's not a question of kids being sissies. Bullying is a pattern of cruel and aggressive behavior that must be stopped by parents first, then schools, then by management in the workplace. Bullying kids grow up to be bullying adults. Workplace bullying is pervasive and ruinous. Targets of workplace bullies lose their jobs, their health and their sanity. Some commit suicide. Children and adults who are bullied are not wimps and sissies - they are the targets of people with severe behavioral and psychological issues who have never been stopped. Support the Healthy Workplace Bill and parents, let your school administrators know you take bullying seriously and they must do the same.

The world of the internet, one way or another, is going to be the backbone of our civilization for the next several decades. Currently cyberspace is a lot like the Wild West in 19th-century America: millions of people rushing into this new world of opportunity, with virtually no order, control or oversight. Most people are acting responsibly out there, but more and more people out there are exploiting the lack of oversight to do all sorts of things they couldn’t possibly get away with in the real world. A growing problem out there is harassment: cyber-stalking and cyber-terrorism. Abuse on the internet has already claimed victims: Megan Meier of Missouri killed herself at the age of 13 after a group of adults targeted her for bullying and betrayal in MySpace. One would think that this sort of behaviour would largely be confined to tweens and teens, but the sad fact is that many adults, faced with the prospect of sitting down at their laptops and enjoying a powerful megaphone that can reach the whole world, with no consequences, indulge in behaviour that would make them cringe if their names were publicly attached to them. Abuse is a big problem and it’s growing, spreading. And some people are working hard to spread it, deliberately.

One of the largest networks for internet communication is Delphi/Mzinga, and one of the biggest forums within that internet family is a place called Isle Of Whack. With 30,000 members, it is fairly huge, and its influence spreads across the internet. And its most cherished aim is…abuse, bullying, cyber-stalking. The ringleaders of this group launch terror campaigns against their own members and even outsiders, with thousands of posts of insults, malicious rumors, namecalling, gang attacks, threats, and attempts to stalk victims in real life. They deliberately target the weak and vulnerable, victims of abuse, anyone who dares to defend the victims, or anyone who shows signs of, no other word for it, decency. Their greatest joy is to cause one of their victims to go into a “meltdown”. In one case they tried to encourage a girl to commit suicide. The abuse and the stalking can go on for years, hunting victims in real life, trying to cause problems in people’s workplaces and families. The effort is quite organized and sophisticated. Some victims are so scarred that they are afraid to speak out about the abuse – some are afraid to use the internet at all, for fear of being hunted. Some victims are also abuse victims in real life, and they have in some cases shown more fear of the IOW attackers than their real-world attackers. Even though this behaviour violates not only the forum terms of service but also state and federal law in some cases, the parent organization which has oversight over all this has ignored complaints, tossed victims aside, and essentially surrendered control to the Isle Of Whack regulars: the victims have only two choices – hide or leave the internet entirely.

Welcome to Cyber-Bully University. The Isle Of Whack.

http://gadflies1.blogspot.com/

How likely is it that a child with CP was able to climb out of a window onto the ledge in an attempt at committing suicide? I've followed this story since the weekend and have heard numerous versions. "My child wanted to committ suicide. My child was on the window ledge and wanted to jump." Did she want to committ suicide or did she climb onto the window's ledge in an attempt to jump? Did a student kick her in the head or did a student try to kick her in the head? We've heard multiple versions from the student, too. Bullying is wrong. Period. I'm just wondering if the actual events are being sensationalized for our viewing and reading pleasure.

Bullying occurs daily and, quite frankly, it is a learned behavior from society at large and parents in particular. When a student gets picked on at school, the parents will show up at the school and threaten to fight the other students and anyone who gets in their way. Fighting is not the answer but neither is caving in. We live in a society that is increasingly more and more uncivil to one another. I try to teach my students how to decrease the tension in situations but have had parents tell me that "I want my kid to knock the **** out of anyone who bothers them." What message does that send? I feel sorry for those students who try to do the right thing and then get chastised by parents and peers. Makes me sad.

I think the hard part is knowing just where to draw the line when giving your kids advice on dealing with bullies. I have a son, and I have told him that if someone hits him, etc. to immediately tell an adult (he's in elementary school). He's done that, and the adults in charge have done nothing. The kid hit him again, and my son hit him back. This is what I've told him to do: first tell an adult, do not fight back. If the adults do nothing, stick up for yourself. Call me what you want, this is the real world.

School: "we have no funds." That's one of the knee-jerk reactions we get from schools. Translation: keeping our kids safe isn't a financial priority for us. Phooey.

Bullying will not stop in schools until two things happen:
1) Schools must admit that what they are doing isn't working
2) parents and taxpayers insist on better solutions and hold the schools to it.

We continually take an outside-in approach that means trying to manage the problem once it occurs instead of working on an inside-out approach of teaching kids the social skills, character and values they need to prevent bullying in the first place.

Schools believe they have done all they can because they have their federally-mandated programs in place. It doesn't matter that THEY AREN'T WORKING. Merely because "we have one of those" means they won't consider anything else.

Hey, one BCPS elementary school responded to us with the "we have no funds" message and I had to laugh. We didn't try to sell them anything, we didn't ask for money. Heck, we have a program in place where we DONATE our program, which has been proven to eliminate bullying in schools -- it doesn't cost the school anything.

But if "we don't have funds" is the automatic answer, what does that mean for the value of our kids' lives and safety?

Bullying is unacceptable behavior and shouldn't be tolerated. Homeschooling your kid due to bullying problems continuing after telling the administration about the problem isn't working isn't being a coward or a wimp; it's standing up for your yourself and your safety. All students have the right to feel safe at school. Leaving someone in a relationship and filing protective orders on them due to domestic violence isn't being a coward; it's standing up for yourself. You don't always have to be confrontational in a direct way to stand up for yourself.

Yes, bullying does continue into adulthood. The difference is as an adult, you have more freedom when it comes to social environments you're in. Sometimes as an adult, you can't change the social environments you're in. Bullying as an adult is taken more seriously as an adult than a kid; people don't use boys will be boys, it's a part of life, etc when it comes to adults bullying other adults. Some jobs bullying occurs often, and other jobs it rarely occurs. As an adult, you can always file protective orders and get the police involved if you're having a bully problem. When you're a kid at school, you often can't change schools, have to be around that bully and when telling administration doesn't work, it makes kids miserable because they feel trapped and unsafe in school. While bullying does occur in the adult world; it's taken more seriously as an adult, you're less likely to get away with bullying as an adult, it's more unacceptable as an adult, and you have more freedom in who surrounds you as an adult.