Bullies still lurking in school halls

In a study last year of 75 schools and community centers in Colorado, about 58 percent of students admitted to either engaging in physical bullying or standing by while someone else did it.

When it comes to verbal bullying, the number jumps to 67 percent, according to the survey conducted to evaluate the Colorado Trust’s Bullying Prevention Initiative.

“Bullying is still a significant problem in Colorado schools and schools nationally,” said Del Elliott, director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado. “Very often teachers and principals don’t have a good handle on how much bullying is going on.”

Whether or not Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were bullied — or to what degree — remains an open question. But in the immediate aftermath of Columbine, bullying assumed a prominent place in discussions about school safety.

Schools sprang into action with bully-prevention programs.

Maria Chamberlain, Faith Kyambalesa and Tia Jones are sophomores at East High School who have sat through their share of bully-prevention assemblies. They are not particularly impressed.

“Nothing’s changed,” Chamberlain said.

“There’s still bullying, fighting, calling people names,” Jones said. “If you tell, you’re a tattletale or a snitch.”

“It’s mostly in the hallways,” Kyambalesa said. “Teachers probably don’t see it.”

Not a black-and-white issue

Susan Payne, director of the Safe 2 Tell program, which runs an anonymous tip line for students, has conducted more than 1,000 bully-prevention trainings across the state.

“There’s a lot being done, but it’s still a struggle,” she said. “How seriously do we take it? How do we deal with the victim? The bully? There’s no cookie-cutter answer.”

In 2005, the $9 million Bullying Prevention Initiative was started by the Colorado Trust in 40 counties to try to figure out the best way to teach students how to behave.

Results were tracked twice a year with more than 3,000 students in fifth, eighth and 11th grades. Students who said they participated in or watched physical bullying dropped from 69 percent to 58 percent over three years. For verbal bullying, the drop was 76 percent to 67 percent.

Students told the evaluators that adult intervention in bullying is essential in elementary and middle school, but by high school much of the bullying takes place outside the view of adults.

New technologies — such as social networking and texting — have dramatically increased that threat, said William Modzeleski, who heads the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools at the U.S. Department of Education.

“We need to get a critical mass of kids to police themselves and their peers,” he said. “There are just not enough cops and teachers to do it.”

But Amanda Stahlke, a senior at Smoky Hill High School in Aurora, is skeptical students will step forward.

“If someone hits everyone at once, and you try to be the one or two students who do something about it, you’re smashed,” she said. “There’s no way you can stand between a text and the bully.

“That’s where things have failed,” she said. “We don’t need to learn not to bully each other; we need to learn to stand up for each other.”

Teaching those skills, however, requires time and money. A school-based bully-prevention program can cost thousands of dollars and needs staff training to implement.

About 40 school districts, including Denver and Englewood, use Positive Behavior Support, which focuses on teaching social skills and relies on students to report where bullying is happening.

Others use the Olweus anti-bullying program, which teaches intervention and includes 20-minute sessions where kids talk about bullying and learn to help stop it.

One problem, though, is moving those lessons outside the school walls.

“Often they don’t link out to the adults and parents at home, and they definitely don’t want to talk about the community where kids live,” said William Pollack, director of the National Violence Prevention and Study Center.

An exception to that is Brush Middle School in Morgan County, where bullying rates were among the highest in the state.

It opted for the Olweus program and included the entire school staff so bus drivers, cafeteria workers and custodians all held students to the same standard.

Training on how to spot a bully and how to intervene extended into the community, including workers at the local roller rink, the library and the movie theater.

“Parents were probably the most resistant,” said Angel Giffin, the district’s bully-prevention coordinator. “They didn’t want anyone telling them what to do.”

Giffin gave out her cellphone number, so kids who wanted to report bullying could call or text anytime.

Every student also received a wallet-sized card with the number for the Safe 2 Tell hotline, which started in 2004 and estimates four of 10 calls are about bullying. The tips have prevented 27 planned school attacks in Colorado, executive director Susan Payne believes.

“That means plans being recovered, weapons, torturing devices or explosives,” she said. “Someone was arrested, charged and expelled.”

Keeping it real as students get older

In one case outside Boulder, a 17-year-old boy wrote “teachers should die” on his MySpace page, and told other kids, “One day, the world is going to know who I am. I swear it.”

The student was expelled, and the case turned over to the police.

At a school south of Denver, “School shooting, November 21st” was written on the wall in the boys’ restroom. The tip allowed police to heighten security and intercept the student involved.

“We have to make sure we keep this on the front burner,” Payne said.

For older students, part of the trick is changing the message so high-schoolers don’t feel they are hearing the same lessons they got in third grade.

“Bullying really is not a high school word; it’s an elementary and middle-school word,” said Kathy Smith, principal at Cherry Creek High School. “They’ve been taught by teachers in the past, over and over. What we talk about here is ‘intimidation’ and ‘harassment,’ because they’re in the big-time world now.”

Figuring out how to keep students — and teachers and parents — engaged in the struggle against bullies year after year is the only way the culture at schools will change, Pollack said.

“Over the 10 years since Columbine, I’ve seen positive change,” he said. “But I still see too many tears and heartache and loss to feel that we’re there and that we can give up the struggle. We’re still in the middle of it.”

Colleen O’Connor: 303-954-1083 or moc.tsoprevnednull@ronnococ