As if the infomercials themselves weren’t bad enough, I noticed a very disturbing trend in their topics. Out of twenty-five infomercials showing at that hour, only one had nothing to do with weight loss. Several extolled the wonders of diet programs. “We’ll ship our wonderful gourmet food right to your door!” “You will receive three meals plus two snacks and two shakes for every day!” That’s more food than I eat in two days to be perfectly honest.

“I went from a size 12 to a size 2! Thanks,____!” A size 2? Since when is that a normal size? There is even a commercial for one of the weight loss programs where five or six friends sit around and complain about how fat they were after they had a baby and how disgusting it was for them to wear such huge clothing. They all agreed that dressing up and wearing make up when you feel fat is not something you want to do. To make matters worse, the producers of the commercial thought it was a good idea for these spokeswomen to say that women who are naturally big  shouldn’t feel bad. It’s ok to be big and dress pretty, it’s just not for them. EXCUSE ME??  So, it’s okay for me to be a big woman and need to wear a size 18, but not  you? You have to be model slim?

I realize that we have an obesity problem in our country. I understand that we need to be concerned about hearth disease and stroke. I acknowledge that I could shed a few pounds, but I really despise that these ads play on the insecurities of people with weight issues. They advertise their weight loss programs using spokespeople who are  half my size and want me to be impressed that they lost twenty pounds. They charge people a fortune for diets, exercise equipment, weight loss supplements, body wraps and the list goes on and on. They make it sound like wearing anything over a size 8 is tantamount to sin. Not once in any commercial do they mention body structure, age, overall health or genetics. I was a 5’10″ young woman with an hour glass figure and a 19″ waist. I carried that physic around with me, never caring about what or how much I ate until I hit my late twenties. Over the course of a little more than a calendar year I gained approximately 60 lbs. I went to my cardiologist who told me I was fat and lazy and ate too much. He refused to run any blood work on me. I went to my gynecologist who said I was under tremendous stress and felt that once my life settled down a bit I would feel better, but just to set my mind at ease, he would run the blood work. He knew that my grandmother had a goiter and so thyroid disease ran in my family. Two days later, I was at my parents’ house when he tracked me down to apologize, my thyroid was hardly working. I started on medication immediately and started to feel wonderful. I never dropped the extra weight completely. In fact my weight and dress size tends to fluctuate. Am I supposed to feel somehow inferior to the stick insect models on the runways because I have a gland that does not work? Why is our society so obsessed not with healthy weight but with the smallest weight possible, whether health or not?

Just to add insult to injury, there are an ever growing number of catalog outlets catering to larger people. In the mens’ department, they refer to it as “big and tall”. For women, larger sizes have cute terms like “One Stop Plus” and “Woman Within”. They say they cater to women sizes 12-26. Here we go again…size 12. The models in the mens’ catalogs show tall men, large men and tall, large men. In the womens’ catalogs, the models are all tall, slender and…you guessed it, a size 12 (if that).  Now, how are women supposed to interpret that? A size 12 is large? Really? I think not. The outfits, while beautiful and stylish, are all made for slender size 12′s. If you are larger than that and order one, chances are good that you will be sending it back because you look nothing like the model in the catalog.

I have several friends, male and female who, like me, are considered “big”. The men do ok shopping, not that they shop much or really have that many clothes. The women on the other hand hate shopping, they only shop online and still hate it. I love clothes, I’ll admit it. Having grown up in Catholic school I loved the freedom of real clothes instead of uniforms. Since then I love clothes. Unfortunately, clothes no longer love  me…and neither do the designers or the advertisers.

Bullying does not end for those of us who were not born with the grace of good genes. We continued to be bullied by other adults, t.v. commercials, store clerks, and our mail. Frankly I am tired of what it does to not only us, but our children who feel inferior because they came in a larger package.

There is a great deal of talk today about childhood obesity, and while that is true, we need to find a happy medium between focusing on a healthy weight and encouraging girls to hyper focus on thinness. We seem to either have it one way or the other.

Kids today are much heavier than thirty years ago. A great deal about our society has changed over the last thirty years. There are more single parents,  more fast food, more video games, and less playtime outdoors. Our schools’ nutrition services have taken a big hit when it comes to discussing childhood obesity.

I see many school lunches and while some of what is served is not the best, there has been a vast improvement in the quality of the food over the last few years. Due to an increased emphasis on testing, recess time has decreased in order to increase time spent in the classroom. Parents tired from a long day at work cook less at home and the inexpensive nature of fast food makes it all too inviting. Children no longer play outside after school; some students cannot go outside to play because their neighborhoods are unsafe or because they do not have adult supervision. Many students, however, tell me that they would much rather play video games.

Whether a child is overweight or not there is a great deal of pressure on children, especially girls, to conform to a certain body type. Movies, television, singers, actresses and models all present an image for girls on how they are ‘supposed’ to look. Clothes only come in certain sizes and if you need a “plus” size, you won’t find it in the store and if it is in the store the styles are not the same and they are seldom attractive. Fashion designers seem to think large people all want clothes made out of polyester and dark colors. Little girls wind up wearing petites which means they are wearing womens’ clothes and are unable to wear anything that the other girls wear, which is embarrassing.

All of this leads to a big problem we face in our schools…size bias. Just like many forms of bullying, this trickles down from adults. People who are over weight or even just larger are seen as lazy, stupid, inferior or dirty.  The kids who consider themselves the “in crowd” will not interact with them. Their self-esteem plummets and by third grade  many of these students are engaging in eating disorders. They binge eat or don’t eat at all. They long to look like the “normal” kids and will do whatever they can to try to emulate that image to the best of their ability. I have had many kids, male and female, come to my office in tears because they are tired of being called “fat”, “lazy”, “tub of lard” or even worse names by their classmates. I run self-esteem groups in both middle and elementary school all year long to help students deal with a world fixated on thinness.

A recent ad campaign in Georgia, Strong4Life,  aimed at reducing childhood obesity outraged many people. It showed photos of overweight children with captions indicating that the children may inherit diabetes, or not out live their parents. The ads appeared on billboards. One Atlanta writer, Ragen Chastain launched a “Support All Kids” campaign. In just a few hours she raised enough money to put up billboards of her own countering the outrageous and offensive Strong4Life billboards. The National Eating Disorders Association has joined her in these efforts. When things such as dieting are not closely supervised by a doctor and done in moderation, children often fall into eating disorders.

I’m not saying that children do not need to be taught to make good choices when it comes to eating, getting  more exercise and watching their weight, but I also do not think that only children who have weight issues need to be taught this. I also do not believe that all this focus on “perfection” that children see in magazines, on tv, and in the movies should be held in such esteem. We need to teach children good habits while also teaching them to accept themselves and to treat others whether they are small, large or somewhere in-between with respect. I’ll close with a quote from J.K. Rowling on the subject of size:

“‘Fat’ is usually the first insult a girl throws at another girl when she wants to hurt her.
I mean, is ‘fat’ really the worst thing a human being can be? Is ‘fat’ worse than ‘vindictive’, ‘jealous’, ‘shallow’, ‘vain’, ‘boring’ or ‘cruel’? Not to me; but then, you might retort, what do I know about the pressure to be skinny? I’m not in the business of being judged on my looks, what with being a writer and earning my living by using my brain. I went to the British Book Awards that evening. After the award ceremony I bumped into a woman I hadn’t seen for nearly three years. The first thing she said to me? ‘You’ve lost a lot of weight since the last time I saw you!’
‘Well,’ I said, slightly nonplussed, ‘the last time you saw me I’d just had a baby.’
What I felt like saying was, ‘I’ve produced my third child and my sixth novel since I last saw you. Aren’t either of those things more important, more interesting, than my size?’ But no – my waist looked smaller! Forget the kid and the book: finally, something to celebrate!
I’d rather they were independent, interesting, idealistic, kind, opinionated, original, funny – a thousand things, before ‘thin’. And frankly, I’d rather they didn’t give a gust of stinking chihuahua flatulence whether the woman standing next to them has fleshier knees than they do. Let my girls be Hermiones, rather than Pansy Parkinsons.”

- J.K. Rowling

About a month ago I wrote a post about the jury selection for the Dharun Ravi trial. Mr. Ravi was the roommate of Tyler Celementi and this trial focused not on his role in Clementi’s September 2010 suicide, but rather the invasion of privacy leading up to it. Ravi had set up a hidden webcam which recorded Clementi’s sexual encounter with another man. When that webcam video was viewed by others in the school, the events which led to Clementi’s suicide are said to have started.

Last Friday a New Jersey jury convicted Ravi on 15 plus counts including invasion of privacy and bias intimidation. Now, he faces up to 10 years in prison and the possibility of being deported to India – a country he left at age two. But what are the real spoils of this trial, the issues it addresses and the lives of Clementi and Ravi?

This morning on ChildsWork, I posted a decidedly opinion-laced article about the “real” victims of this tragedy. Clementi is certainly one, but I believe that Ravi is another. As we sit here and debate the issue of bullying and particularly cyberbullying, I wonder how Bullying Education readers would feel about this issue and I invite you to join our conversation.

A lot of what we focus on here on Bullying Education revolves around the prevention of bullying behavior through positive role modeling and systematic regulations about violence, both physical and otherwise, within our schools. But how do those policies relate to the prevention of violent outbursts or the escalation thereof by school personnel?

A new legislative bill on the floor of both the House (HR1381) and Senate (S2020) is seeking to address the neutralization of violence in school through regulating the ability of school personnel to use restraint and seclusion on students who are acting out. Though the reports recognize that these students are disproportionately special needs students, the extension of these practices into the general population is clear, since hallway and classroom fights can often be the symptom of an underlying problem between two students or groups.

Readers of BE are uniquely situated to address these issues, and I invite you all to review the report from the American Association of School Administrators (AASA) on this legislation as well as the response from disability advocacy group TASH. On our sister site, ChildsWork, I have also reviewed the contents of these two reports as a means to generate a dialogue between our readers about the implications of this legislation on multiple levels.

If our goal is to keep schools safe for all students, at what point should it be “alright” to intervene? And, what cost are we willing to pay for that intervention?

One of the roles I fill in my school system is being a member of the “Flight Team”. Our team provides crisis response to the schools in our county in case of a tragedy at one of our schools. So far we have been very lucky. We have had student and staff deaths from illness and accident, but thankfully no school shootings. On Thursday of this week, the team will be welcoming some new members with a workshop on how our team operates and a review of some of the flight teams we have activated and what we have learned from them. I know as we prepare our new flight team members Monday’s tragedy in Chardon, Ohio will be on all of our minds.

Chardon is a beautiful little town. It’s claim to fame is being the “Home of the Geauga County Maple Festival”. Looking at its website, you will be reminded of a quaint turn of the century town right out of  The Music Man.

“The City of Chardon prides itself on offering a serene and peaceful atmosphere with the conveniences of modern amenities, making it a desirable community for both residents and visitors.”

Unfortunately, this lovely place in the heart of our country was forever marred Monday. It will now always be associated with a school shooting. Like Columbine and Lancaster before them, Chardon will grieve as a community whose children have lost their innocence.

The suspected shooter was identified by a fellow student who saw the incident. He told ABC news that the alleged shooter was an outcast and bullied. The young man’s Facebook page read:  ”He longed for only one thing, the world to bow at his feet. Die, all of you.”

Parents are shocked when I tell them to only allow their children internet access when they are present. They see no reason for their children not to have a social networking site, or why they should have access to it. Principals bristle when I tell them that all school have bullying and that it is not normal and cannot be tolerated. Many people, find it hard to believe that bullying could lead to anything so tragic as a school shooting.

I urge you to listen  to the children in your life. Be they your own or your students. Do not tolerate bullying. Do not ignore the needs of the victim. Err on the side of caution and monitor children who are going through multiple traumas.

Cheri Lovre of the Crisis Management Institute assisted in the aftermath of Colmbine, Lancaster, Hurricane Katrina and many other tragedies. She trained our Flight Team and has many wonderful handouts for parents and staff to assist in speaking with students who will inevitably have questions about Mondays shootings. You may find her on the web at: http://www.cmionline.org/home/cmi_1330402766132/page_880?utm_source=For+Parents+-+Talking+With+Your+Children+After+School+Shootings&utm_campaign=ParentGuideSchlShootings&utm_medium=email

Girls receive mixed messages from all directions about how they are supposed to look, feel and behave. Commercials show elementary age girls doing everything from playing with dolls to dressing like fashion models. TV shows dress them like little adults, have them speak in a sassy manner to their parents and discuss issues beyond their years. Walk through any department store girls/juniors section and you will be astonished by what you see. thongs, halters, mid-riffs, skinny jeans, low cut tops, shortie shorts, and more silk, satin and sequins than I wore to my wedding and numerous formal dances put together. Now, I’ll admit that I am not exactly a girlie-girl. I’d rather wear jeans and a t shirt, go camping and hang out with the guys than dress up, but there certainly is a happy middle and a place for everything.

I have been conducting “Girl Power” groups for a very long time. I started them back when Donna Shalala was Secretary of  Health and Human Services. The program teaches girls how to model themselves after women they respect and to not follow the pack simply because they are afraid to be different. The funding for the program ran out but I continued with the groups over the years using a variety of activities from a variety of programs and many I made up on my own. As the years rolled by I found myself with more and more girls referred to me and before I knew it, I was running groups all year long with girls in grades 3, 4, and 5. When I moved on to middle school, I started a group for sixth grade girls and that took off as well. This year I am between a middle school and an elementary school. I have two groups of sixth grade girls who meet for lunch every week, a second grade girls group who meets weekly and by the end of the year, I will have seen all 67 third grade girls who will have participated in a six session workshop. Every few weeks I also join a fourth grade teacher and the seven girls in her class for lunch.

The formats vary from group to group, but goal is the same….ending relational aggression. Girls need to learn to speak to one another and listen to one another. They need to understand how to let things go. As verbal as most girls are, they really do not communicate effectively. They tend to talk at one another rather than to one another. They judge each other by surface attributes, rather than getting to know one another. When they feel their social standing threatened by another female, they spread rumors, ruin reputations and blame the victim for their actions.

The goal of the groups regardless of age or grade level is the same: to improve a girl’s self-esteem. Girls who feel good about who they are and engage in adult directed activities which allow them to learn more about other girls, do not feel the need to put other girls down. The components vary according to ability but cover the same six skills:

1. I am a treasure (cool things about me)

2. Identity (who am I and what do I like?)

3. Body Image (my favorite parts of me)

4. Problem solving (who can I turn to for help)

5. Communication (puppet role plays to address relational aggression)

6. Putting it all together

The girls who come to the groups/workshops feeling like they do not fit in, find friends in the group. They begin to identify with others and form friendships they otherwise would not have. Recently one group of girls wanted an audience for their puppet role plays. A male pe teacher happened to be available so they asked him to join them. He remarked that one young lady had not spoken more than two words in his presence since she entered kindergarten four years earlier. She spoke quite a lot once our workshop got moving. He was quite impressed. The young lady, who identified herself as someone with no friends at our first meeting, left with five.

Small groups, meetings or workshops where girls can learn more about who they are and who the other girls are can facilitate friendships forming. They stop worrying about who is still playing with dolls and who has a cell phone, nose ring or is already wearing make up. They give the girls the opportunity to learn to communicate.

This morning on our sister site, ChildsWork, I posted a plea published by a colleague of mine, Peter DeWitt, that asked educators to remember the special plight of LGBT youth when walking the halls of high schools.

I felt that Peter’s message was especially apt today, which marks the beginning of jury selection for the Tyler Clementi trial. Tyler, a Rutgers University student and talented violinist, committed suicide on September 22, 2010 when he jumped off of the George Washington Bridge. A bright young man, adored by his family and friends, though also shy, Tyler killed himself over fallout resulting from a video posted online by his roommate, Dahrun Ravi, which showed his sexual encounter with another man.

Tyler’s case, sadly, is not unique, as we all know. Cyberbullying comes in many forms and, many times, is unfairly targeted at LGBT youth who are already struggling with their identity and issues of self-worth. While the court system will have its say on Tyler’s case, let us all as educators, parents and human beings have our say as well: cyberbullying, any bullying, is not okay and LGBT youth need our support and love.

Read my full story on ChildsWork.com/blog.

The survey I conducted in elementary school was done with fourth grade students. The Kids Helping  Kids Questionnaire (The Ophelia Project, 2006) was administered to 141 students in the fall of 2011. There are eleven questions and each question has the possibility of three answers: disagree, not sure, or agree.

From their answers to these questions, I would decide how to proceed with my guidance lessons for the remainder of the school year. I generally do three to five lessons during the year on bullying and problem solving, peer relationships and the like. I work empathy and cooperation into all lessons I teach. The elementary school has a school-wide behavior program which encourages and rewards good behavior. The principal is very firm about disciplining students involved in bullying, but there is no school-wide bullying prevention program. The students are taught to use a decision making model to assist them in making the right choice. The only prevention is the classroom guidance lessons and any follow up the teachers provided. I was interested in seeing how this system was working for the students.

The questions and results were as follows:

1. Excluding others, spreading rumors, leaving someone out on purpose are all examples of relational aggression.

Disagree (58)   Not Sure (45)  Agree (36)

It was clear from their answers to this question that most of the students were not familiar with the term relational aggression.

2. It is OK to leave others out of talk about kids behind their backs if they deserve it.

Disagree (124)   Not Sure (5)  Agree (2)

Good news! Most students knew this was not the correct thing to do.

3. It is important to share my feelings with the person who has hurt me. 

Disagree (37)   Not Sure (32)  Agree (61)

The students were quite split on this answer. As they later explained, although the decision making model used by the school instructs kids to discuss a situation with someone they are having a conflict with, they are afraid of being hurt worse if they approach the person and are therefore frightened to do so.

4. Kids who ask adults or older kids to help if someone is hurting them are babies.

Disagree (86)   Not Sure (22)   Agree (22)

A majority of the students believed it was OK to get help when someone is bullying, but our culture still has many students either unsure or convinced that you are a “baby” or a “tattle-tale” if you get help with bullying.

5. It is not my responsibility to help others kids if I am not involved.

Disagree (87)   Not Sure (18)   Agree (25)

A clear majority of student do feel it is their responsibility to help their classmates even if they are not directly involved in the situation.

6. If I just ignore someone who is hurting my feelings, he/she will eventually go away.

Disagree (14)   Not Sure (29)   Agree (87)

The majority of students answered this question the same way kids have answered it for decades. This is what parents and teachers have been telling students for a very long time. When I asked the students about this question later, they all unanimously agreed…..it does not work to ignore a bully.

7.  People act in mean ways because they don’t feel good about themselves.

Disagree (22)   Not Sure (60)   Agree (47)

This again, the kids later explained, came from parents and other adults who tried to explain away why bullies do what they do. They themselves did not believe it.

8. It is tattling to tell on a kid who is hurting someone else (for example, making fun of them and/or leaving them out).

Disagree (75)   Not Sure (26)  Agree (24)

Although most of the students do seem to realize that getting help in a situation is a good thing, there are still quite a few students who either are unsure of what to do or still believe that it is tattling.

9. If a kid hurts you, it is OK to try and get back at them and hurt them.

Disagree (120)   Not Sure (6)   Agree (4)

The only students who did not disagree with this explained that their dads have told them that it is OK to hit people and “defend” themselves.

10. People who are often the target (for example, of name calling, exclusion) may hurt for a short time, but they will get over it soon.

Disagree (33)   Not Sure (57)   Agree (40)

The kids were all over the map with this one. They had no idea what to think. We discussed this in all the classes for quite some time. They, for the most part, thought in the end that it made sense that this could hurt for a very long time.

11. When a friend or classmate has done something that you do not like, you should tell them how you feel. 

Disagree (17)   Not Sure (30)   Agree (83)

The reason the majority of kids answered “agree” to this is because they have been taught through the decision making model to tell the person to “stop”. The students who disagreed or were not sure were afraid to say anything to the aggressor. Through a discussion, the students learned that until the person has been told to stop, and repeats it anyway, it cannot be considered bullying. The person must be intentionally doing things repeatedly in order to upset their victim.

I now knew what work I had lying ahead of me for the remainder of the year. The behavior program and decision making model gave the students an important step towards understanding bullying and the prevention of bullying in their school community, but there were significant gaps in their knowledge base I now needed to get to work on.

However, my work for other firms also allows me the ability to delve into other aspects of society and pop culture. These jobs at worst make me feel hopelessly out of touch and at best contribute to me becoming a better informed parent and teacher. It is through this research that some of the very good and very bad aspects of teen and tween-targeted media cross my desk. Lately, their connection to both bully prevention and normalization has had me both worried and intrigued.

Today, I want to take a look at two pieces of media that I have stumbled upon. The first reveals that as much as we *think* we may have a handle on all the media our students and children consume, we may be mistaken. The second piece, by contrast, gives me hope that properly monitored media usage can have a positive total impact on our kids as role models take the opportunity to step up and call out bullying in all forms.

Case 1: Alloy TV

Have you heard of Alloy TV? Yeah, me neither, and don’t think that searching your local listings will yield any hits. Alloy TV is a subset of the larger website Alloy.com which bills itself as a “Top teen site for fashion, celebrities, horoscopes & quizzes” – it’s basically an online version of Seventeen magazine complete with slang-packed headlines written by women in their 20s and 30s who would rather die than use that language in real conversation, but I digress. Alloy itself began as an online store for teen fashion that then branched into a larger “community” dedicated to bringing teens together to talk about what matters most to them.

Unto itself, the website’s model is harmless and may provide some much-needed companionship for isolated teen girls. However, one of its side projects, Alloy TV, and the philosophy of its marketing plan has a decidedly different undertone. Much of this began with Alloy’s mainstream TV and movie hits like Gossip Girl andSisterhood of the Traveling Pants. But in an increasingly digital society, the movement towards internet-only programming was far too alluring for Alloy execs to pass up. Enter Josh Bank, the 42 year-old president of Alloy Entertainment.

The original web series Hollywood Is Like High School with Money was a brainchild of Bank who saw an opening in the digital market for programming geared to teenage girls and their not-much-older counterparts, 18-34 year-old females. The web series, sponsored by L’Oreal, chronicles the 16-year-old “Queen Bee” and daughter of Hollywood studio exec, Quinn. She decides to “tutor” a one of her mother’s young assistants, Taylor, in the ways of maneuvering and inching up on competition with the show’s name serving as her mantra. Though Bank identifies Quinn as a “study in the Machiavellian teen,” her clear connection to the Mean Girls notion so ripe in cases of female high school bullies presents a problem. For the average teenage viewer, the level of analysis required to “get” the study may be too much.

I watched the series and, as a lit major with a penchant for over-analyzing everything I view or read, I can say that the “humor” of the situation is greatly masked by the very real notion that life really is all about manipulating your way to the top and not giving a riff about who you offend on the way there. Is this a fact? Maybe, but it’s still not one that we need to be drilling into teens thanks to a corporate sponsor. However, the real issue here is a bit more complex.

While Hollywood Is Like High School unto itself is harmless, its 14 million hits cannot compete with more established media, the idea that our teens and tweens are being exposed to these same characters and conflicting messages in yet another medium should be cause for alarm. With corporate sponsors and a lack of ratings, who is policing these “webisodes” and what messages can delicate teens glean from the notion that high school is only replicated over and over again in “real” life?

Case 2: Advocacy in a Song

Daren Kagasoff’s “Bully”

On the flip side to this equation, some of the more established media outlets are making an effort to get into the bullying conversation from the right side. This was brought to my attention recently when my new dalliances into Twitter revealed that one ABC Family teen star, Daren Kagasoff, and his friend George Murphy have made a small step in addressing bullying in a format that teens and tweens are likely to understand: music.

The song “Bully” was released last month on YouTube by Kagasoff and Murphy and has thus far been promoted solely via Twitter and social media. Its tagline that “you mean nothing to me” is a rally call to the victims of bullying that they can fight back against their bullies by being the bigger person. While this is oversimplifying the issue, the idea that words cannot change who a person is inside and that the power of a bully is derived from the feelings of inadequacy that they place onto their victim are important for teens to hear from their peers.

Simple, clear and a little bit catchy – my kids immediately started dancing to the song and I’m a bit ashamed to admit that it’s been stuck in my head for days – the lyrics here take on a different perspective in the anti-bullying movement: victim support. The idea that Kagasoff, co-star of the ABC Family series The Secret Life of the American Teenager, and his friend present is that we may not be able to “stop” bullying in all of its forms, but we can empower its victims and prevent lifelong struggle through support and, dare I say it, song.

This is not a PSA; it’s a message that bully victims are not alone. Perhaps better titled “Dear, Bully” Kagasoff and Murphy’s song may help more than one teen see the forest for the trees in their life, a far cry from Hollywood Is Like High School’scontention that the trees are all there’ll ever be.

Media Is Everywhere

The lesson that I hope my cases here provide is the importance of media monitoring from all angles. Each day as I scour some of the less-traveled corners of the web I am struck by the amount of information we don’t know. As a mom, as a teacher and as an advocate for bullying prevention from all angles, I hope that the messages, both good and bad, being spread here are catalysts for the most powerful bullying prevention tool we all possess: communication.

Not Concerned at First

Jim Mollison is the principle of West Des Moines Valley High School, just outside of the state capital. West Des Moines Valley is host to some 2,200 students, and holds the distinction of the largest high school in the state.

That’s why when he first heard about a false Twitter account that was set up under his name, the immediate response was to ignore it. As a principal, Mollison knew that the decision he made to ban sexually suggestive dances as school events would experience some backlash. As an administrator, he was prepared for criticism and aware of the media of choice for his students. But that was only at first…

The Attacks Get Personal

What started as a silly prank quickly turned more personal, however, when the tweets turned anti-Semitic and were accompanied by a picture of Adolph Hitler. Since Mollison’s wife and children are Jewish, these attacks hit a little too close to home. He explained to the Associated Press, “They weren’t mocking, they weren’t joking, they aren’t voicing concern about the dance. They were just being blatantly degrading to my wife and children.”

The account was deleted this past Tuesday, but not without struggle. When Mollison first learned about these offensive tweets, his first response was to contact Twitter directly. However, the response was anything less than helpful. Since the tweets didn’t technically violate any of the website’s policies it could not be removed, the company then sent him some information about bullying. This is when the case became more complex. As we know, dealing with the intricacies of new media and the roles of schools in policing its use is not a clear cut problem/solution.

Finding a Middle Ground

Like the court cases in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, the debate over the role of teachers and principals can play in policing the use of media outside of school property has become heated. The students at West Des Moines Valley seem split as well. Most students were clearly offended by the tweets, yet they were unsure as to whether or not it was right or if it should be allowed.

The American Civil Liberties Union agrees, siding with the other court cases which ruled that the importance of free speech outside of school grounds trumps the bullying issues in school. Though the district has made steps towards limiting social media use among its faculty and administration, but there have been no similar moves made concerning students for exactly that reason. All this does is continue to complicate the issue of bullying inside of school, since the line of appropriate action seems to be drawn differently depending on the environment.