By Chris Yow
Editor
TRUSSVILLE — Trussville City Schools are aware of the nationwide problem with bullying, and that’s why Superintendent Pattie Neill and her administrators are rolling out a campaign to combat the problem before it hits Trussville.
Neill showed the school system’s board a slideshow at their last meeting, highlighting statistics from her previous job at a system in Tennessee. The statistics showed once the system defined bullying and taught students the definition as well as the harm it can cause, the amount of disciplinary action taken dropped tremendously.
The school system of around 8,000 students began with around 500 suspensions per year, and that number grew in the first year of the campaign, something Neill said is expected among teenagers.
“It got a little worse before it got better,” Neill said. “Once you start talking about it, students want to experiment, and that’s expected.”
Through the next five years, though, the number dropped each year until it reached as low as only 138 suspensions in the system.
Neill defined bullying saying it is a repetitive, ongoing behavior intended to cause harm to another student or students. Many students aren’t aware of that definition, and often times will report bullying when the incident is an isolated one.
“(Our administrators) work every day with students who come to their office who say they have been bullied when they really haven’t been bullied. It’s been a minor incident that happened one time. Even though it meant harm and is a disciplinary situation, it isn’t a bullying issue,” Neill said.
She said the school system wants to combat bullying before it really begins in the system.
“We want to be on the proactive side dealing with discipline issues,” Neill said. “If we do a good job rolling out the anti-bullying campaign and rolling out the character education campaign, we will have fewer discipline problems to deal with because students will behave to start with, rather than having us react to their misbehavior.”
The campaign has worked in the past, Neill said, and she wholeheartedly believes it can work here. One of the reasons is because students will know what bullying is, and they are being taught to recognize the victim of the bullying as well as take notice of other witnesses. Students will then have a specific person to whom they are to report any bullying activity.
“We want to have a go-to person in every school. There is some sort of counselor or administrator students can go to,” Neill said. “Students won’t have an option to say they didn’t know who to go to.”
With this roll out, Neill hopes it will change any thoughts that bullying is rampant in the system.
“We want to reduce the notion that there is a high frequency of bullying going on in our schools. If there is a high frequency, we want to remedy that,” Neill said.