Albemarle surveys students on bullying

Albemarle County wants to determine the extent of bullying in its schools and ways it can be prevented.

Surveys will be administered for the second year to Albemarle elementary students and the third year for middle-school students.
Of the 2,416 Albemarle elementary students surveyed last year, about 28 percent said they’d been bullied once or twice a month, while 8.5 percent said it happened several times per week. For middle-school students, the rates were about 23 percent, and 6 percent, respectively.

Bullying is “pretty widespread” and far from a new phenomenon, said Susan Limber, a developmental psychologist at Clemson University. “It’s been around forever, seemingly, but we know much more about it than we knew before.”
“We know that children who are bullied are more likely to have problems with depression and anxiety [and] have low self-esteem,” Limber said.
Limber, a graduate of the Albemarle County schools and the University of Virginia, has researched bullying prevention for 15 years, including extensive evaluation of Olweus, a bullying prevention program now used in Albemarle schools.

Olweus has been found to reduce bullying among children, improve the social climate of classrooms, and reduce antisocial behaviors such as vandalism and truancy, according to Clemson Univer-sity’s Web site. The program, which has been implemented in more than a dozen countries, is named for Dan Olweus, a Swedish researcher who in 1970 started the first scientific study of bullying in the world.
Limber said Olweus is effective partly because it’s a comprehensive approach — a sentiment shared by June Jenkins, Albemarle’s community relations coordinator and bullying prevention coordinator.

“It’s not a curriculum. It’s not something that we actually have lesson plans to teach. It’s more of a climate approach,” Jenkins said. “And the goals, really, of the program are to, first of all, reduce existing bullying problems within the school and then also to prevent the development of any new problems. But more than that, it also effectively addresses peer relations at the school.”
Jenkins, a national Olweus trainer, said one of the program’s most important components is classroom meetings teachers hold each week in all of Albemarle’s elementary and middle schools.
“This is a vehicle where students actually sit and talk about what’s happening to them, where it’s happening, what they can do,” Jenkins said. In addition to discussing bullying, teachers also talk with students about conflict resolution, problem solving, and other social issues, such as making friends, Jenkins said.
Among other things, the bullying survey helps administrators realize where bullying is occurring in schools, Jenkins said. Albemarle middle-schoolers said last year that the most common places are in hallways, outside and in the cafeteria.
At the elementary schools, nearly 50 percent of students said they’d seen bullying outside in the past month; and 35.5 percent said they’d spotted bullying “on the bus or at the bus stop.”

More elementary students said they have told a parent they’d been bullied — 26.3 percent — compared with those who told a friend — 24.9 percent. Less than 18 percent said they have told a teacher or another adult at school.
While research about the frequency of bullying varies, Limber said, some studies show that about one in five middle-school students say they’ve been bullied several times in a single semester.
The approach to dealing with bullying has evolved, she said.
“I think we have sent the wrong message in the past: ‘Well, it’s really up to you kids to deal with bullying on your own,” Limber said. “Many kids tell us that they can’t.”
Bullying is defined in the elementary-school survey as “hurting someone who is smaller or weaker” by actions such as hitting or threatening to hit, teasing or “getting everyone to be mean to you.”

According to the middle-school survey, where students are asked to identify the type of bullying they’ve experienced, far more have suffered verbal bullying than physical.
“Physical is not the one we see most often, it’s the verbal and the social,” Jenkins said. “And we are seeing an increase in some of the cyber bullying. … Sometimes those are the harder ones to find, because they’re so subtle in what they’re doing and the physical are so obvious.”

A key for parents, Limber said, is to listen to their children and take what they say seriously.
Jenkins said that teachers have a difficult mission in trying to explain to young children the difference between telling and tattling. Tattling is done to get someone in trouble, while telling is done to get someone out of trouble, she said.
As for the students who bully at a young age, that can be a sign of major behavioral problems to come, Limber said.
About 5 percent of Albemarle’s elementary students responded that “it feels good when I hit someone,” and 6.5 percent said bullying “is sometimes fun to do.”

Of the middle-school students, more than 19 percent of students said that bullying “is sometimes fun to do.” However, more than 15 percent admitted that they weren’t paying attention to how they were answering the survey questions, and more than 10 percent admitted they were not fully telling the truth.
Students are expected to finish completing this school year’s surveys by the end of the month.