At the second annual Bullying Stops Here event last Thursday evening at Sebastian River Middle School, emcee Geoff Moore of Treasure and Space Coast Radio presented some startling statistics – that some 3.2 million students are victims of bullying every year, including roughly 160,000 teens who skip school every day as a result of bullying.
“That’s a lot of missed classes because they’re afraid to go to school,” said Moore. “This is a bigger problem now than it was when we were all kids.”
Increasingly, bullying can no longer be accepted as a fact of life. In addition to physical and emotional bullying, the 24/7 aspect of cyber-bullying and sexting has taken things to a whole new level, resulting in escalating numbers of suicides and school shootings.
In recognition of October as Bullying Prevention Month, the free collaborative forum was hosted by Suncoast Mental Health, a nonprofit organization offering counseling, case management and psychiatric care to children and adults.
Panelists included Suncoast CEO Art Ciasca, School Superintendent Mark Rendell and Director of Student Services Lillian Torres Martinez, IRC Sheriff Deryl Loar and Deputy Mark Howder. Additional speakers included Boys and Girls Clubs Executive Director Elizabeth Thomason and Big Brothers Big Sisters CEO Judi Miller.
Miller spoke of the impact of pairing children with caring, adult mentors to keep lines of communication open. As models of kindness on how to treat others, she said mentors help children think through strategies to resolve their problems and identify their own strengths.
Thomason said Boys and Girls Club have zero tolerance for bullying. She showed the emotionally charged video children made last year that demonstrated how words can hurt and the importance of standing up for others.
Rendell said that the School District is charged with providing a safe, supportive learning environment for the children in its care, noting that a child who doesn’t feel safe is unlikely to learn.
Stressing the need to build trusted adult/student relationships, he added, “Those relationships can help us deal with those issues more quickly, before they become something that gets out of control or involves violence.”
Torres-Martinez spoke about the School District’s various proactive, age-appropriate programs and curriculum, adding that each school has a trained student support specialist. She and the other panelists stressed the importance of children speaking up about bullying incidents.
“We look at the victim and the bully, because they are our children and we have to protect them both,” said Torres Martinez, noting that bullies are often victims of child abuse or violence. “So they both need the intervention. We need to look at both sides and provide services for both.”
“If you look at children between the ages of 8 and 18, one in five of those children has a mental health disorder that is significant enough to cause a severe impairment in their day to day lives,” said Ciasca. “Adding bullying to the mix is really problematic. It can be a recipe for school violence with tragic consequences.”
“Bullies are not only in school,” said Loar, noting they are also in the workplace, at home, neighborhoods, sports teams; essentially everywhere.
Loar and Deputy Mark Howder stressed that while they deal with school bullying issues on a daily basis, arrests are the avenue of last resort.
“It’s my job as a resource officer on a high school campus to be more of a counselor, a mediator and an educator,” said Howder, before showing a video on cyber-bullying as a viral epidemic.
“That goes on in our schools during the day, during lunch, during the hall change. It is massive and it is an epidemic that we have to combat every day; that we have to deal with every day as professionals and as parents.”
