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Department of Education Readies School Bus Drivers for Free Training on Harassment Response
By Ryan Gray KANSAS CITY, Mo. — An 11-year-old boy in the Boston
suburbs was charged with assault this spring after racking up a history of bullying, which culminated with an alleged beating of another student on board their school bus. Massachusetts has one of the most stringent school bullying
laws in the nation, the result of recent, high-profile student sui- cides. Te policy was applauded by Education Secretary Arne Duncan in a December memo to state school chiefs and state ed- ucation boards that outlined the key components of strong state laws against bullying. Massachusetts requires schools to provide training to an extensive list of staff members, including bus driv- ers, to help them prevent, identify and respond to bullying. Every state except South Dakota has a strong bullying or ha-
rassment law, some stronger than others, but the majority of school bus drivers are seemingly left out of any discussions on how to respond to and report incidents. According to a study conducted last fall by the National Educa-
tion Association, 90 percent of school bus drivers nationwide said they should be intervening when students are harassed physically or verbally on or around the bus. But only about 25 percent of those drivers added that they have received necessary training. Kevin Jennings, the assistant deputy secretary of the U.S. De-
partment of Education’s Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools, aims to change that. He said research shows that students who are bullied and ride the school bus are more apt to report cases than students who get to and from school via some other mode of transportation. Te margin is nearly 2-to-1. So Jennings announced in March at the Transporting Students
with Disabilities & Preschoolers National Conference that school bus drivers would finally be receiving what they’ve been asking for in the form of a training module being developed in conjunc- tion with NAPT. While the exact content remained unknown at this writing, ac-
cording to NAPT Executive Director Mike Martin, the training is expected to be free-of-charge and come in the form of a compre- hensive list of resources that school districts can incorporate into their annual, monthly and weekly training programs. Dr. Nan Stein, a senior research scientist at the Wellesley Centers
for Women and an expert in civil rights law, said school districts can hide behind the term “bullying” when the incident or behavior is truly harassment. Last October, Assistant Education Secretary Russlyn Ali wrote that some student misconduct that falls under a school’s anti‐bullying policy also may trigger responsibilities under one or more of the federal anti-discrimination laws enforced by
20 School Transportation News Magazine May 2011
the Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). By limiting its re-
sponse to a specific application of its anti‐ bullying disciplinary policy, Ali continued, a school may fail to properly consider whether the student misconduct also results in discriminatory harassment. And this can put the district out of compliance with federal law. Te American Civil Liberties Union weighed in on the ha-
rassment topic, specifically in California. A case there involves a 13-year-old boy who hanged himself to death last September after being harassed for years by other students because he was gay. Te ACLU outlined several steps the Tehachapi Unified School District located outside of Bakersfield, Calif., should take to create a safer environment for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered students. Tese steps included creating strong anti-harassment policies and programs, taking complaints of harassment seriously, providing professional guidance for school staff about how to identify and stop anti-LGBT harassment, explaining the harmful impact of anti- gay harassment to students and staff and supporting a gay-straight student alliance on campus. Tehachapi Superintendent Richard Swanson said, “No one
that truly knows the schools and the district should accuse it of inaction.” He pointed to the nationally-recognized Olweus Bully- ing Prevention program and the “Character Counts” education program that the district uses to teach students the “Six Pillars of Character,” namely trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fair- ness, caring and citizenship. School bus drivers along with the rest of school employees
also take annual Internet training on bullying response and pre- vention provided through the Self Insured School of California program. Tere are also quarterly assemblies on behavior, middle and high school curriculum on tolerance, the Safe School’s Am- bassadors program, and discipline procedures that respond to bullying and other anti-social behavior when it is reported by students, parents or identified by staff. “Tese were all in place, but these things didn’t prevent Seth’s
tragedy,” Swanson added. “Maybe they couldn’t have.” Stein added that schools should be wary about adopting the
plethora of bullying and harassment education programs that are available because many of them lack effective, evidence- based interventions for prevention and remediation.
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