The Sentinel - Volume 8, Issue 27

Posted Wednesday, March 12, 2008

During the month of January our entire school community participated in a weeklong project designed to increase awareness of bullying and its impact on the students in our program. One aspect of the initiative was a survey specifically designed to provide parents with a venue for offering feedback on their experiences and perceptions of this issue within our community. I am grateful that so many of our school families took an active part in this process. Of the 324 families in our community, 214 participated in the survey.

Attached to this week’s newsletter are the results of the survey as well as a summary page, both of which have been compiled by Mrs. Sweeney as part of her internship in school administration. I wish to thank her for her dedication to this task and for all of the time she has invested in the process.

The information provided to you this week represents a starting point, rather than a summation of our efforts. With the survey results now in hand, we have established a benchmark for future reference regarding bullying in our school.

In my own review of the data, I noted a couple of areas that I think are fundamental to understanding the issue as it exists in our community. For example, while a significant number of families indicated that their son/daughter has experienced bullying at some point during their time at school, a very limited number reported that their son/daughter has faced this challenge on an on-going basis. Herein lies a distinction between the nature of bullying and what we may refer to as an isolated instance of teasing. In both cases, the actions are unacceptable, but the repetitive, on-going nature of bullying makes it a distinct challenge. A good starting point for our community would be to clarify exactly what we mean by the term bullying so that students, faculty, staff and parents can all speak the same language when referring to incidents. A second aspect of the survey that I found telling is the disparate answers related to the effectiveness of the faculty and staff in their handling of bullying. While the actual instances of bullying are limited, the feedback provided by parents indicates a concern in the staff’s ability to address and stop these occurrences as they take place. Two action items that we can derive from this are the need for continued training and the establishment of a common response among the faculty and staff. Secondly, providing clear information to parents as to how we actually handle instances of bullying may help to boost confidence in the staff’s effectiveness.

In summary, I believe that the results of the survey indicate that bullying is not a pervasive problem at All Saints, but that there is room for improvement in how we collectively respond to incidents and in our communication of procedures to the community at large.

Now it’s time for us to roll up our sleeves and identify some clear steps for moving forward.

Look for more information in the weeks ahead as to how we’ll continue to tackle this issue in our school. In the meantime, please take a few minutes to review the summaries provided by Mrs. Sweeney. Again, thank you to the many parents who participated in this important survey.