Bullying pushed down in Hernando

Combating bullying is becoming more than just advising teachers on how to spot it on the playground.

Educators are being taught that bullying happens through the Internet and phone messaging. There are new challenges to find out who is doing the bullying and by how many.

Jim Knight, director of student services for the Hernando County School District, said state and local school officials have been working the past two years to better track bullying when it occurs and develop programs to stop it.

For some schools, he said the result was an increase in reported bullying incidents, especially for the 2009-10 school year.

However, the overall number of bullying incidents in the county decreased by 32.8 percent from 125 reported in 2007-08 to 84 reported in 2008-09. School threats also decreased by 9 percent from 66 incidents in 2007-08 to 60 in 2008-09.

Knight said increases in bullying incidents for most schools were due to the increase in awareness programs.

At Parrot Middle School for example, reports of bullying doubled from 11 to 22. Knight said after a few sessions of talking to students about acceptable behavior, more began to come forward and report incidents.

Technology isn't always your friend

As technology - and young people's ability to use it - has grown, so have students' ability to bully one another.

Knight said students are not only using e-mails, texts and Web pages to bully or harass each other, they're able to do so anonymously from their homes and in groups.

"There are even Web sites made specifically to bash people anonymously," Knight said. "It used to be that bullying was real personal and we could figure out who was doing it. Now because of cell phones, Facebook and the Internet, there are more mediums for people to bully people anonymously."

State lawmakers made changes to how school districts track and handle bullying after an incident two years ago when a student killed himself after being bullied. Since then, Knight said education officials realized more needed to be done to combat bullying before it starts.

In Hernando County, Knight said a new bullying complaint process not only addresses dealing with the bully, but the victim as well.

Along with punishing a student for bulling, school officials are now required to tell parents what they will do to keep their child safe and address the problem.

As for the bullies, Knight said he and other district staff members are working to create programs to educate first-time offenders about their behavior in hopes that will fix the problem.

That means instead of only receiving a few days of out-of-school suspension or some similar punishment, the student would have to take an anti-bullying course.

"Basically, we want to do more than just punish a student," Knight said. "We want to educate him or her as well about their behavior so we might be able to fix other problems in the future. But if they still do it after that, there is no excuse."

For more information about the school district's bullying policy or to view a complaint form, go to www.hernandoschools.org.