School staff plugs into cyberbullying

By Jennifer Grybowski
Turley Publications Reporter

STURBRIDGE-Bullying and cyberbullying is all over the news these days, and the faculty and administration at Tantasqua Regional Junior High School is taking it seriously.
Assistant Principal Dana Labb, Health teacher Jaime Armin, Art teacher Carol Willard and Science teacher Kristin Daley attended anti-bullying training in Worcester earlier this month, held by the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center (MARC) and sponsored by the Worcester District Attorney’s office. The tuition was paid for by a character education Community Service Learning (CSL) grant.
The MARC is housed at Bridgewater State College. Their goal is to bring low or no-cost services to K-12 educators, law enforcement and other professional caregivers for children in the commonwealth. MARC was founded and is directed by Dr. Elizabeth Englander, a professor of psychology at the college, and an expert in the field.
The seminars focused on bullying and cyberbullying, and were intended to teach trainees to be able to train their peers. They received all paper and DVD materials they need to conduct their own trainings and were walked through the process interactively.
“It was well worth going,” Armin said. “It was already in this curriculum, but the seminar added more impact to it.”
Labb said the seminars were “eye-opening.”
“It’s a community problem,” he said. “We need a whole change in environment to deal with this.”
Labb said the administration will find out what the scope of the school’s reach is after legislation is passed.
“When it starts becoming a major disruption in school, you have to discipline,” he said. “But you have to determine what a disruption is. That needs to be clarified by the state, then the school. We all need to address it together.”
The bullying seminar provided basic information about bullying prevention, plus training in techniques that can be used to train colleagues about bullying facts and prevention. The focus is on recognizing bullying, understanding it as an abuse behavior and responding to incidents effectively. The cyberbullying seminar included a review on recent research and findings about cyberbullying, and training that emphasized commonsense, non-technical lessons.
Armin said she was eager to learn about different types of bullying, such as name-calling, texting, sexting and cyberbullying.
“As a faculty, we see stuff, but there is stuff we don’t see too,” she said. “Bullying is happening, but we’re not seeing it as much because it used to be physical bullying.”
Another component to the training was learning how to get students to report bullying.
“Not being a bystander, that’s a big point,” Armin said. “That’s what I teach the kids. Be assertive, speak up, stand up for each other, take care of each other.”
She said she has to explain to students although they might set their online pages to private, once the words leave them, they aren’t theirs anymore. She said they are shocked to learn that their parents can access their texts and phone calls.
“They don’t realize it doesn’t disappear and that private doesn’t guarantee privacy,” she said.
Armin said she took a poll in her classes and found that only around a quarter of the students in each class had talked about the Pheobe Prince case at home, and that some students were completely unaware of it.
Armin said that part of the eighth-grade curriculum tackles depression and suicide. Because of these recent events, she said she talked about that more in her seventh-grade classes this year too.
“Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem,” Armin said.
But even more important to her were discussions about the bigger issue of what’s really happening with kids these days.
“Where is society going with all of this,” Armin asked.
She pointed to the anxiousness teens feel when they are not able to pull out their phone and text all the time.
“We have to talk about appropriate cell phone use, etiquette and netiquette,” she said.
Labb said he also found these discussions, and idea of the “digital disconnect,” most interesting.
“They live another life online,” he said. “That’s the way we’re dealing with life and society. They see it as a victimless crime.”
He also talked about the immediacy of online life and the lack of having any time away from school life to calm down from an argument.
“People are taking emotions and making them immediately known,” he said.
Technology teacher Jennifer Santos has incorporated Netsmarts – a presentation of online safety - into her curriculum for years.
“Sometimes they don’t connect [the behavior] to themselves,” she said. “That’s why we do a connected activity. I try to connect what we’re seeing to current events, tie it into what’s going on in the world.”
Through that, Santos discussed the Prince case and impending legislation with the students. She said the general consensus among students was they don’t think a bill will stop cyberbullying, but they are not sure what would.