Creating the Infrastructure for Best Practices Bullying and Harassment Prevention
Review and/or Enhance Polices
Assess and/or Enhance Policies
Committee Logistics/Functioning
Development of Rules/ Sanctions/ Positive Supports
Supervision Plan
Training and Professional Development
Implement Classroom Meetings
Staff Discussion Groups
Evaluation
In order to achieve a school or community culture in which attitudes, values, beliefs, and norms reflect and actively support academic, social, emotional and physical health and excellence thereby accomplishing the mission of the school or community organization in which youth are served, an infrastructure must be in place. Based on the research and practices of both state and national experts, the following elements should be included and executed:
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Review and or Enhance Policies Strategies:
- Ensure that sound school board policies are in place to address:
- Bullying
- Sexual Harassment
- Harassment, including harassment based on race, color, sex (gender), sexual orientation, disability, religion, ancestry, or national origin
School board policy is essential to your school system’s efforts to prevent bullying. Your board is elected to govern the school unit and its schools. It accomplishes this by adopting policy that sets goals, establishes direction, provides support and emphasizes accountability.
Maine law does not specifically define bullying. Definitions of bullying, some developed by researchers in the field and others by state legislatures attempting to address this issue, vary in their language and scope, but they typically reflect two common themes - repeated harmful acts and an imbalance of power between bullies and their victims. Bullying may be physical, verbal or psychological. Bullying includes, but is not limited to: assault, tripping, intimidation, demands for money, destruction or theft of property, destruction of another student’s work and pervasive taunting or name calling. Some behaviors that are otherwise prohibited by law, for example, sexual harassment, are also recognized as forms of bullying.
The determination whether particular conduct constitutes bullying requires reasonable consideration of the circumstances, which include the frequency of the behavior at issue, the location in which the behavior occurs, the ages and maturity of the students involved, the activity or context in which the conduct occurs, and the nature and severity of the conduct.
Bullying, harassment and sexual harassment are not the only considerations in developing a safe and welcoming school climate. Teachers and school administrators should be supported in their efforts to set and enforce rules for civility, courtesy and/or responsible behavior in the classroom and the school environment.
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Assess the Climate of Your School or Organization
Strategies:
- Survey your population - There are a number of bullying and climate surveys and measurement tools you can access by reviewing the resource listing in this Guide/web site. In general, however, it is critical to understand the current behavioral and climate realities as perceived by both staff/adults and youth/students in order to know the impact of intentional and enhanced policy and programming efforts.
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Committee Logistics/Functioning
Strategies:
- Recruit and form a committee involving Administrators, Teachers, Non-Teaching Staff, Parents, Students, and community coalition members that reflect the full range of school community’s diversity (e.g. gender, race, religious faiths, orientation, single parent, two-parent/family, foster parents);
- Schedule regular monthly meetings for the committee;
- Determine the logistics of future meetings of this group and the roles within the committee.
- Determine how information/feedback will flow between the Coordinating Committee and teachers and staff.
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Development of Rules/Sanctions/Positive Supports
Strategies:
- Formulate consistent and specific school rules against aggression, bullying, and harassment and make them visible and available to all students and staff at the beginning of the school term;
- Examine how rules fit in with the school’s existing behavior plan and support school’s goals;
- Discuss ways to encourage and support positive behaviors and the positive actions of bystanders, both students and adult;
- Discuss possible sanctions to use when bullying/harassment rules are violated.
- Discuss general principles/criteria to use in applying sanctions to both adult and youth incidents based on CLEAR differentiation of:
- Bullying
- Sexual Harassment
- Bias-based Harassment (Sexual orientation, race, disabilities, etc.)
- Gender
- Age
- Cultural Sensitivities
- And other aggressive behaviors
Ensure Youth and Staff
- Know the differences between bullying, sexual harassment and bias-based harassment.
- Be aware of the gender and age as factors in the frequency of bullying at different grade levels.
- Understand that not all aggressive or hurtful behaviors are bullying, but may still constitute unacceptable conduct in the classroom or the school environment.
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Supervision Plan
Strategies:
- Develop a supervision plan that reflects the needs of your school- that provides increased supervision in locations where your school survey data indicates bullying is most prevalent. Possible locations for increased supervision might be hallways and stairwells, bus, playground, cafeteria, and in the classroom. Decide how this plan will be effectively communicated among all staff.
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Training and Professional Development
Strategies:
- Train staff about the roots of bullying and harassment, effective and ineffective interventions, the school’s policies and plan, prevention strategies, and strategies for dealing with bullying incidents.
- Develop mechanisms for informing all staff (including bus drivers, cafeteria workers, etc., who may not be able to attend the staff training) about the Bullying/Harassment Prevention Program, updating them on activities, and soliciting their input into the school’s anti-bullying/harassment effort. (Consider working through your Coordinated School Health Team/Program).
- Develop mechanisms for informing all parents about the Bullying Prevention Program and involving them in planning and activities.
- Discuss ways of involving students in planning efforts for Bullying Prevention activities such as through a Gay Straight Alliance, Civil Rights Teams, Peer Leadership, etc.
- Determine a means of informing all students early in the semester about the Bullying/Harassment Prevention Program (e.g. Consider a school assembly, grade-wide meetings, school television, etc.)
- Invite experts in the field of bullying/harassment prevention, gender, cultural competency, hate crimes, etc. to work with both adults and youth. Use presentations that are designed to lead to action rather than just awareness.
- (A list of Maine-based experts/presentations attached/linked)
- Focus on bystander actions that can make a difference rather than on programs that try to convince youth not to bully or that try to convince youth to stick up for themselves. Placing responsibility for making change onto the victim is unsafe and can cause further damage.
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Implement Classroom Meetings
Strategies:
- Implement regularly scheduled classroom discussions that relate to bullying and harassment and its impact on student physical and emotional safety and health.
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Staff Discussion Groups
Strategies:
- Implement regularly scheduled staff discussion groups to discuss issues related to bullying. Setting up a book study is one good structure for these discussions.
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Evaluation
Strategies:
- Measure the Climate and student reports of bullying annually against where you started and make adjustments as needed based on student and adult feedback to include parents and non-teaching staff. (Note: Please see resource listing for evaluation information).
Some materials were adopted from a variety of bullying and harassment resources such as Olweus, Schools Where Everyone Belong, and research from members of the LD564 Design Team.
