On anti-bully law, no excuses for slowpokes

The law was passed in the spring, in the shadow of high school student Phoebe Prince’s death in South Hadley nearly a year ago. She was one of several teens across the country who took their lives after enduring verbal, physical, or cyber attacks. In response, the Legislature imposed new requirements for prompt reporting and investigations of bullying incidents and broad-based training of school staff to identify bullying.

Yet with the Dec. 31 state deadline looming, only 238 of 394 school districts in Massachusetts — not even two-thirds — had filed anti-bullying policy plans demanded under the new law. The state is so far putting an optimistic face on this. Department of Education spokesman JC Considine told the Globe, “It’s a very fluid process — they are pouring in.” Also not worried was Glenn Koocher, the executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees. He said public consciousness about bullying is already making potential bullies “more careful before they open their mouths.”

Let’s hope their optimism is rewarded with conspicuous scrambling by the laggard districts during school vacation week.

In the last two years alone, a series of nationally publicized tragedies shed light on the consequences of bullying, a problem that pervades school systems of all sorts and cuts across racial and income lines. In addition to Phoebe Prince, there was Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, an 11-year-old who hanged himself in Western Massachusetts last year after being told repeatedly that he was gay and acted like a girl.

Before those deaths, years of talking on Beacon Hill had yielded nothing, leaving Massachusetts as one of the last states without anti-bullying laws. But under the new law, school administrators can no longer treat bullying as a matter that can wait. This is fortunate because teens have an eagle eye, and they notice when adults countenance any misbehavior with a wink and a nod. If kids see that administrators cannot get it together on bullying policies, the bullies surely will feel free to prey on vulnerable students.

The school districts’ sloth is all the worse because the state has already done a fair amount of work for the districts, providing a model plan districts could simply tweak to meet their own circumstances. The state law is well crafted — so much so that US Education Secretary Arne Duncan praised some of its key provisions earlier this month in a national policy letter.

“I have very little patience for the arguments that ‘kids will be kids’ and there is not much that schools can do to make schools much safer,’” Duncan said earlier this year. “I hate the excuses and I hate the passivity.”

Yet in Massachusetts, bureaucratic excuses seem to abound. There has been grumbling by some school committees and politicians that the bullying policy is yet another unfunded and burdensome state mandate. Others question whether anti-bullying laws are so focused on individual perpetrators that they might fail to address a cyclical culture where bullies were themselves once victims.

Those are legitimate concerns that need to be addressed, but that has not stopped the most conscientious districts from filing their plans and sending a clear message against bullying. In West Springfield, School Superintendent Russell Johnston wrote his district’s policy himself. “The buck stops with me,” he told the Springfield Republican. The school committee in Westfield takes the issue so seriously that, according to one committee member quoted in the same paper, the district intends to review its policy twice a year.

The requirements of the new law are specific and achievable. In Danvers, School Committee Chairman Arthur Skarmeas told the Globe, “Administrators, students, teachers, and parents all now have a very clear set of rules and a complete outline of what can be done and what has to be done and what is expected. I think it’s extremely worthwhile.”

The best way for the state’s new bullying law to come to life is for all districts to abide by it. If we do not understand by now that we need a clear set of rules, we never will.

Derrick Z. Jackson can be reached at jackson@globe.com.