We held our bullying prevention 
webinar last week and we had more than a thousand people register (you were there, weren’t you?). That phenomenal response confirms to me that the topic of bullying prevention is on the minds of many educators, administrators, and school board members.
A decade ago, right after the Columbine shootings, I wrote an article about bullying and what districts were doing to prevent it. I was heartened to discover that the attitude about bullying that I grew up with (it’s natural and adults shouldn’t interfere) was fading.
I revisited the topic in our September issue to see what had changed in the decade after Columbine. A lot, as I found out. The school shooting tragedy has spawned a huge body of research on how bullying affect students and the best ways to do school-based prevention. The people I interviewed said that fewer educators and administrators had to be convinced of the school’s role in prevention.
I mentioned my article to my brother when he visited this summer. He’s in his mid-50s the age of many administrators and school board members. He asked if schools should be preventing bullying, because it was going to happen anyway. I answered with a resounding yes school is exactly the place to do this. Schools should be a safe haven for students, and they don’t learn very well when they’re being threatened, shamed, or made fun of.
David Cullen’s excellent book, Columbine, published this year, showed that neither of the two young killers was bullied. It was a myth that took on a life of its own because of our very real need to find a rational explanation for what happened. That doesn’t change the fact that other school shootings had their roots in bullying behavior and that research has shown that bullying brings student achievement down and hurts children long into adulthood.
Read my September article here, where you can also check out my first article. Also, we’re going to post the webinar, in case you missed it.
What do you think? How big of a role should schools play in bullying prevention? Leave a comment and let us know.
Kathleen Vail, Managing Editor
