GLENN LANDB ER G
Third graders at Andrus Elementary learn about bullying from school counselor Judy Herman.
Aside from the immediate safety concerns, being bullied can cause emotional problems that last decades and affect everything from grades and graduation prospects to marital and job success. A study published in the March 1998 edition of the medical journal Headache: The Journal of Head and Face Pain found a significant connection between migraines in youth and the stress of being bullied. And that’s nothing compared to the recent rash of high-profile suicides by teens bullied for their sexuality, or events like school shootings, which often have roots in bullying. But the bill—which would have required schools to enact and enforce a bullying policy, keep and report data to the state and make a third bullying offense an infraction to be dealt with by a judge—wouldn’t have stopped bullying anyhow. At least Matt McCarter, program coordinator for the Safe and Drug Free Schools Coalition in the Idaho Department of Education, a supporter of the bill, didn’t think so. “The question isn’t can we stop bullying,” said McCarter. “The question is can we do better?” He thinks we can. But to do so, McCarter said the focus needs to be not only on retributive justice against bullies, or on comforting the afflicted, but on improving the overall school climate, something SB 1105 didn’t directly address. The two biggest changes the bill would have made would have been to ramp up penalties, making a third bullying offense a criminal infraction, and to mandate that schools collect data. That data could have been used to more effectively craft policies to address both immediate risks and issues of overall school climate. “If we don’t have clean, accurate, valid data, we don’t even know where to point to find the problem,” he said. Though the bill wasn’t enough, McCarter still saw it as a crucial first step and a giant coup for a state that doesn’t mandate data be collected on hate crimes. “When I wrote the bill, I had been at a number of conferences on bullying,” said LeFavour. “The U.S. Department of Education had folks who would really talk about what was most effective. They said you need
14 | JUNE 8–14, 2011 | BOISEweekly
training for teachers, you need categories, and you need strong principles.” But she said two of those are things that can’t be legislated in Idaho. “Members of the Senate told me it would go nowhere if classes (race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc.) were listed,” said LeFavour. This caveat should be no surprise considering Idaho’s perennial failure to amend its human-rights statute to include sexual orientation. But when those statutes are taken off the table, not much is left legislatively except the criminal penalties, something LeFavour said she only put in as a compromise with Senate Education Committee Chairman Sen. John Goedde, a Coeur d’Alene Republican. Well, those and the “second amendment solutions” Blackfoot Republican Rep. Jim Marriott advocated for third-graders facing bullying when he tried to amend the bill to protect a student’s right to self-defense without penalty at a meeting of the House Education Committee on March 22. That proposal was hotly debated, but hit the wall when Boise Democrat Rep. Sue Chew, who had remained silent until that point in the meeting, shared a personal story of the time she brought a knife to her elementary school because of continual harassment for being Asian. However, the training, principles and improved school climates that McCarter and LeFavour talk about to address bullying aren’t totally absent in Idaho. They’re just not universal or mandated at a state level, meaning it’s a combination of the luck of the draw and the amount of resources a district has available that determines the safety and climate of any given school. And nowhere is that divide more clear than in the state’s largest school district— Meridian. A plaque hangs on the wall of Judy Herman’s office at Andrus Elementary proclaiming her Counselor of the Year in the Meridian School District for the 1999-2000 school year. “Strangely enough, I hated school as a kid,” said Herman. “But I’ve been working in one for over 18 years now.” WWW. B O I S E WE E KLY. C O M