A 14-year-old child committed suicide in New Jersey after she was bullied in school and the video was distributed over social media.
The shooter who killed three students attending class at Michigan State University had a note on him that he planned to carry out a similar action in Ewing.
Another 14-year-old, a boy from Paterson’s Eastside High School, was fatally stabbed during a fight at dismissal just this past Friday.
We have a crisis in our schools. Adults aren’t doing enough to make the classrooms, hallways and campuses a safe haven for our kids so that they can reach their full potential.
We are supposed to believe, according to parental rights groups, that the answers are to ban books about human sexuality and race as well as make sure that we have more guns in schools.
School boards have become a political battlefield where adults have seen to have forgotten the mission of education: creating a safe environment for all to flourish.
The death of Adriana Kuch, the freshman at Central Regional High School who killed herself on Feb. 3 after a video of her being attacked by four classmates was spread around school and social media, is heartbreaking and should be a wake up call to everyone.
But it goes straight to anger when you hear members of the community for hours tell its board members that bullying and harassment is part of the culture of that school.
“I was bullied out of this school but not only students, but teachers,” said former student Sidny Mohel, who left the district two years ago. “And to be honest, to let it go on when I know it wasn’t just me — it was other students, too. And now hearing these people tell their stories – it’s just appalling and nothing’s been done about it.”
Think about the mindset that school district had: Triantafillos Parlapanides resigned after he allegedly disclosed personal information about Adriana’s family and health history in emails to media outlets, a textbook case of victim shaming.
So how does this type of culture in a school manifest itself? Easily, if board members believe that a student getting a harassment, intimidation, and bullying (HIB) warning is worse then the act itself.
Take the Ramapo Indian Hills school district serving Franklin Lakes, Oakland and Wyckoff, whose board is a parental rights majority after last November’s election. It has overturned six out of nine discipline recommendations made by the school superintendent this year, after not doing so to any the year before.
The husband of board member Kim Ansh, a Republican elected to the Franklin Lakes Council in November himself, speculated that HIBs result because of an overheard taken the wrongs way by a teacher or weaponized by students to get their fellow classmates in trouble.
“There’s other students that take it, and they hold it as a threat against people, their classmates, if they say something, and they threaten to file HIBs against them,” said Joel Ansh. “I’d like to know exactly how that is protecting students?”
What kind of convoluted, conspiracy-thinking logic is that?
The deaths at schools comes as a new CDC report found adolescents reported increasing mental health challenges, experiences of violence, and suicidal thoughts and behaviors—especially for girls. Nearly 3 in 5 (57%) U.S. teen girls felt persistently sad or hopeless in 2021. And 30% seriously considered attempting suicide, up nearly 60% from a decade ago.
“Young people are experiencing a level of distress that calls on us to act with urgency and compassion,” said CDC Division of Adolescent and School Health Director Kathleen Ethier, Ph.D. “With the right programs and services in place, schools have the unique ability to help our youth flourish.”
That is what makes all of those so maddening—schools are built to handle these issues, trained to investigate the allegations and put all students on the right path to be the best versions of themselves.
High school students can be cruel—they were in the past, they are today and sadly will be in the future. It should make you cringe at the thought that history of being the bully or being picked on is repeating itself with your child—with social media making everything much, much worse. It is the job of teachers, support staff, counselors and administrators along with parents to stop this cycle.
Adriana Kuch should sadly be a lesson for all of us. The question is: are you listening?
The following does not address Vernons failure of a school system with 32% adequate in Math and Science costing $21K per child per year – All schools should have been shut down in 1995, except for special education, and be fully automated online with best teachers recorded once, at own pace, on own schedule, saving taxpayers trillions a year, preventing billions of tons of un-needed CO2 into the environment, and saving 3 hours a day in commuting. They can socialize on own, at their expense, with all the free time and money they will have. Tackles affordable housing and quality of life for everyone. Also tackles bullying, sexual abuse, school shootings, prevent the 142 children a year that die from auto accidents commuting to school (ten times as many as killed by mass shooters) and bigotry. The brightest can excel and not be held back by the slower children. They can hire tutors if needed. Free online school is now available, but it is not on demand on own schedule, and wastes money on millions of teachers teaching the same thing over and over, and they are not the best in the country.
Anyone who thinks that online lectures are the best way to teach kids, just hasn’t been paying attention. If online classes were a substitute for having a committed teacher and bouncing ideas off of peers, MIT wouldn’t be giving away online classes for free. If online instruction were as perfect as Noj thinks it is, we wouldn’t be talking about learning loss due to COVID. And the kids who were middle schoolers during COVID lock-downs seem to be meaner (and less curious about the world) than their older peers, so leaving the socialization of teenagers to what they get on social media seems ill-advised at best.
(And the notion that there was excellent online education in 1995, seven years before MIT’s OpenCourseWare, eight years before MySpace, twelve years before the first iPhone, and thirteen years before Khan Academy, is ludicrous at best.)
Unfortunately there are adult bullies teaching kids how to bully and evidently some have learned well.
It’s unfortunate that this op-ed can’t focus on the real problem of bullying without invoicing a smear of parents protecting their K-3 children from being groomed by radicalized teachers. Both of these issues can be important for parents, it’s not an either or proposition.
The amount of the physical bullying had definitely gone down over the years. According to government stats (https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=719) reports of bullying has dropped 20% from 2009 to 2019. That doesn’t mean we should stop trying to reduce it further.
But this op-ed doesn’t provide any solutions or new ideas. You just are trying to smear Republicans for personal benefit.
It’s a shame because maybe if you took an objective approach and helped people work together, we could save some children from being bullied.