My daughter was so bullied, we had to pull her out of public school and put her in online school. The school did virtually nothing about it no matter how much we pleaded with them. Even when a girl doxxed her and started prank calling her the school gave both her and my daughter a talking to as if it was my daughter’s fault and that was it.
Teachers play favorites and they always loved the psychopaths.
put her in online school
the school did virtually nothing
Another school, obviously
You might have had bad teachers and bad admin, true - but more likely, the school can’t do anything.
I’m a teacher, and I cannot tell you how incredibly frustrated I am at how tied my hands are. The admin can’t do much, either.
My options: talk sternly to the student. Talk sternly to the parent/guardians. And… that’s it.
Send them to the office? Sure. The principal also has those two options, for the most part. Suspending students is something we only do in very rare circumstances, but they really, really try to avoid it, because so often, kids are acting out because of stuff at home, so suspending them only makes the behaviour worse.
We can’t do detentions after school or on weekends - we can’t force parents to bring their kids in then. Lunch hour detentions, we can’t afford dedicated staff to run them, especially since we’d also need them to chase the students down, because it’s not like they’ll go just because they were told to. We can’t fail students any more.
Our district has also even gotten rid of prizes for achievements - no more honor roll, no awards, nothing. Apparently this makes the low performers feel bad, and we couldn’t have that.
And talking to the parents? Most parents are honestly great, but also, I never talk to them, because the kids with the great parents, I never need to call home. The asshole kids? Their parents are almost always a nightmare. And it’s a waste of time to talk to them.
One kid last year, went after another kid’s field trip paperwork with a pair of scissors. Ripped into her like no one’s business. Sent an email home describing the situation. I was pretty sure, based on her history, she wasn’t really going to destroy his stuff, she was trying to get a rise out of him, so I said something like, “while I believe she was only intending to annoy him, not actually destroy property, it is critical for her to understand that this is absolutely unacceptable behaviour” or something like that.
So rather than telling her kid off, mom goes to the principal to try to get me in trouble for calling her kid annoying.
In application? Doesn’t matter what the teachers or even admin want to do. The district, province/state, and country have taken away practically every carrot and stick, when it comes to students with extreme behavior.
It’s a huge mess.
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I had an unusual lesson from my parents regarding bullies. They told me, that if they found out that the I didn’t even try defending myself from bullies and found out, I’d still get whooped at home. It seems kinda cruel at surface level. But when the time ultimately came, dam straight I fought back tooth and nail. And no, they were not abusive in any way. Even reflecting back as an almost 40yr old adult. They were both prison guards/swat people. So they had a very different perspective of bullying I guess.
I can understand all of that, but when one kid doxxes another and starts making prank calls, which we provided evidence of- we had logs and voicemails- and the administration admonishes both kids, that’s on them, not on anyone else. They didn’t have to lecture my daughter about bullying the other girl when she was the one being attacked.
If your daughter was doxxed, can’t you file a criminal complaint directly with the police? At least where I live, it would be grounds for a criminal investigation.
People have tried many times and it never works. Not in the U.S.
See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxing#United_States
Damn, that’s a shame. He in the EU, there’s tons of laws that can be used on cases like that, and many times, they are and work.
Hope things get better for you in the future.
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Thanks.
In that case, yeah, you’ve got an admin problem. I’m sorry - that really sucks. The entire system desperately needs an overhaul. The education system in Canada is a dumpster fire, and the US is even worse. Dealing with behavioral issues is one of many major problems…
Thanks. At least we have a solution, even if that solution involves me quitting my job. She’s more important than my job anyway.
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My bully flicked an ink refill at my face, went into my eyes, and right in front of the teacher. I punched him, was taken to the principal and he made me APOLOGISE TO THE BULLY, and shake hands with him. The whole education system is broken.
She doesn’t even fight back. She doesn’t like to do that. I’ve tried to tell her to do it and she just doesn’t have the self-esteem. It’s been bullied out of her. I wish I had taken her out sooner. I feel pretty guilty about that. But I didn’t really accept that it was a situation that would not be resolved until Halloween, where she wore a really cool anime cat girl costume which looked exactly like a character she loves- I don’t remember the name- that my wife made for her. I’m not big on anime, but it was like high-end cosplay level when it came to a costume. My wife is really talented. She was so excited that she wouldn’t even take it off all day after my wife finished it. She wore it to school and basically the entire school told her she was a furry and her costume was terrible and made fun of her the entire day. She got up the next day and broke down and said she couldn’t go to school anymore and we realized that was something that is not fixable.
This might be a long shot, but ask her if she’d be interested in learning martial arts. She doesn’t need to “learn how to fight” for it to give her more confidence. It worked for me
I’ve asked her before. It doesn’t interest her. She’s not an athletic kid. Also, there are other issues I can’t get into.
While it’s generally good to avoid confrontations and walk away, it’s a good idea to know atleast basic self-defense. School was a terrible experience for me as people with low self-confidence tend to make easy targets for bullies. I hope your daughter gets through school without much trouble. Please do support her. Sometimes it’s not easy for kids to tell people cuz of ego or just the general distrust for adults. Also whoever thought putting a bunch of puberty riddled kids into one room was an idiot.
Middle school is the worst time in school. Kids are absolute monsters at that age.
Aligns with my experience
that’s horrible, pal, i’m so sorry :'( how is she doing now, if you want to share?
She’s still not great, but it’s only been a couple of weeks. She needs time to heal. She’s not going back to a public school until next year at the earliest, and not that school. Unfortunately, I had to quit my job to help her with her online classes, but we’ll manage.
I hope both of you are good. It is really sad to see something like this happen.
Thanks. She’s not great yet, but she’ll get better. I have my own problems.
You’re a great parent. I wish you strength.
Thank you.
When I was in middle school I got into at least two fights in an outdoor stage that was in plain view from all the windows in the admin office. No security, teachers, or anyone else ever noticed.
I’d like to think it was more because they were these small fights where no one got seriously hurt, rather than the staff not caring at all.
The best bully defense is an overwhelming and unrelenting offense. Yes, I realize there are many reasons why bullies bully. As one who was bullied constantly up through middle school, the only thing that made them stop is when I lashed back. Not mediation; not getting teachers involved; not ultimatums. Make them regret choosing you as their target.
As someone that got bullied through middle and high school i relate strongly) but unrelenting offence don’t work when your bully have influential parents, in my case that was it, and i got labelled as near fricking war criminal, even though i was bullied middle schooler, but you’re absolutely right about common cases)
If they believe someone is a criminal already then just escalate things and appear in their houses in the middle of the night while they are sleeping. Worse than a bully only supportive parents. They all deserve the same treatment.
Preach) 🙏🙌
Sent two to ER, didn’t help. Damn kids have no self-preservation instinct, especially bullies for whom playing with fire is their entire thing.
In my opinion, the school is just a glorified daycare and it’s terrible at it. Kids are inherently dumb and because they are dumb they are cruel. And, worst thing of all, is that they take example from others so putting them up together is the worst idea possible. Kids should be surrounded by adults, not other kids. I will do my best to prevent mine from going to school, or, at the very least, make sure they attend a smaller one with reduced classes. Less kids = less problems.
What learned was to fight back when no one was watching. No one believed the bully when they said I did it, and I got some payback.
I learned it the semi hard way to not fight back. I did it once and imediatly got “fucked” by the teacher. That I had complained to the teacher and even the principal didn’t bother them. So instead of fighting back I let all the bad things I experienced burn into me to a point where I just wanted to kill myself. Holidays temporarily restored my will to live but it wasn’t until 8th or 9th grade that stopped thinking about killing myself, since most bullies either dropped out or changed schools.
It’s bully solidarity.
Ding ding ding, this is the correct answer.
Their geopolitics is the same. Fucking shithole nation.
The reason zero tolerance policies get so often implemented is because kids tend to be much smarter in how they go about being dicks to one another than in how they do their schoolwork, or, in how they do almost anything else. If you implement one-sided policies that favor the bullied, it’s then in the bully’s best interest to instead appear bullied, which can end up being a pretty common tactic anyways. There’s also more circumstances under which bullying can take place than just physical. Verbal bullying is much harder to prove and do anything about, and the worst is probably when some random kid gets dogpiled for being different, there’s not much teachers can do about that even if it’s relatively obvious. Which is also resting on the assumption that the teacher isn’t also taking part in the bullying as a way to be seen as “cool” by their students, which is unfortunately something that’s not uncommon. There’s also mutual bullying in which kids can egg each other on until one goes too far, and then maybe zero-tolerance policies end up making some sense, as the group’s behavior as a whole is what really needed to stop.
I think taking a more top-down view of the problem, it would seem to me that there’s a similar problem going on to when reagan defunded all of the mental institutions, or whatever metaphor you’d wanna use here. There’s a lot of attempts to make things right by removing things, rather than adding things. It’s bad to lower a student’s grade as a result of their malicious behavior, rather than their output, and usually bullies have bad grades anyways. Can’t impose on the parents at all because the parents of bullies tend to either be nutso helicopter parents, or tend to be bullies to their children. And then sending kids to other school districts usually just ends up condemning then to a boiling pot of other kids who are maybe worse, or will exacerbate their behavior as it isolates them more, and in extreme cases it can lead them to criminality. Results are going to be kind of mixed on student counseling, if you have a therapist or psychiatrist on campus that’s extremely lucky and can also have mixed results, and there’s really not anything else you can offer kids other than that, for a variety of reasons. It’s relatively hard to get people to stop being self-destructive in the best of times, as an institution, and it’s much harder when those people are kids, and when you’re inevitably going to be some underfunded institution, since schools funded by the rich, and their property taxes, tend to have children that will engage in less bullying, even if those kids are subject to other psychologically unhealthy pressures.
We could probably solve a good amount of this by just funding schools federally on an equal basis, or with voucher programs based on student population, but nobody wants to fund/expand those programs because schools tend to be underfunded and give bad results already, and we unfortunately have a tendency in this country to give something less money when it performs poorly, as some sort of sacrifice to the free market.
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I currently work part-time as a bus driver and I just wanna say that it’s incredibly hard to determine who is right or wrong when you didn’t see what happened and you’re just going by what each kid says. If you only see the tail end of a fight, you might wrongfully think the kid retaliating is the bully. 99% of the time it’s easier to just separate the kids and/or punish them both equally since it’s impossible to determine who the victim and the perpetrator is. It sucks, it feels really bad, but that’s the reality of the situation.
Most of the time teachers don’t care when kid is bullied, i mean long time ago, when i was in school teachers ignored bullies, saying that they’re just playing, when quiet kids got beat up, but when quiet kids retaliate, just like in the meme) teachers come to help) i kinda get it that teachers don’t want trouble and when quiet kids endures, teacher won’t intervene even if quiet kids gonna ask the teacher, but bully won’t gonna endure and gonna screech all over when getting beat up, so i kinda understand why teachers side with bully most of the time, p.s i was quiet kid)
I swear in 5-6th grade It often felt like the teachers themselves bullied me
It didn’t felt like that, it was like that, coming from personal experience, I’ve finished college and enrolled to university and soon will be getting diploma, and I’ve tried to go to school and college where i was, and you know what, it’s rarely in your whole life that you can see such rude people, they called me alot of slurs, implied that I’m couldn’t make it (as they always told me) and praised bullies that was studiying with me in college and school and dropped out of university
The thing is that if someone is bothering you, then you need to go to the teacher. If you set a precedent that one kid is bothering you, then the teacher is more likely to believe you if you ever snap and hit your bully they’ll be more understanding. But if you never say anything and then suddenly snap, then obviously it looks from the outside like you’re the bully.
If you tell then you’re a narc and everyone will think less of you anyway. The only thing that works is standing up for yourself which, thanks to zero-tolerance policies, is no longer an option.
This may have been the unfortunate reality 20 years ago. But security cameras are cheap and ubiquitous. If it’s on school property (including school busses), then this should be simple. Separate the kids, review the footage, and punish the kid who started it. The one who didn’t start it gets an apology and assurances that they’re safe and it won’t happen again. The whole “punish them both equally” is insane and sociopathic.
do you think the schools have the resources to “launch an investigation” every time there’s a fight? you may end up with one side of the story anyways, that’s ridiculous. don’t ask from a school stuff with what the justice system struggles.
The worst kind of bullies will just learn what the cameras are going to capture and not
Let’s hope Steven sets things right 😊🙏
“Zero tolerance” policies in my district are so fucked up and easily metagamed by the actual bullies that I had to outright break the rules and feign ignorance to even let kids take a stand and fight back against the bullies. I hated it.
I’ve been in education for a few years and can tell you that a lot (most?) of teachers are cheering on the inside when they see a bully get his ass beat. These school policies aren’t being set by teachers.
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LPT: Have a friend distract the teacher before you beat your bully’s ass.
Or beat up the bully on his way home. Damn, that was a good feeling… sigh the good old days.
I broke their wrist in art class after they hit me with a chair. Got suspended of course, but it was worth it: People didn’t really fuck with me after that.
I hit him so hard the whole bus heard it. Since a lot of students hated him they chanted to hit him again and I so I did. Also didn’t get bullied for the next three years. The valuable lesson I learned this day was: stand up for yourself.
This also applies to international politics
