Central Regional School District has been  much in the news because 14-year-old Adriana Kuch committed suicide after administrators and teachers allegedly didn’t bother to intervene as four other girls videotaped her beating. Now the district is making headlines again. In this case, the parents of a student with autism are suing because their son has been enduring “a hostile, intimidating and abusive educational environment” at Central Regional Middle School dating back to 2021. The principal there is accused of “showing willful indifference to the illegal and actionable harassment” against the student.

And in Mt. Holly, 11-year-old Felicia LoAlbo-Melendez was repeatedly bullied, even after she begged for help from school administrators who, said her mother,  “ignored her cries for help.” Two months ago, and two weeks after her father died, Felicia killed herself in a school bathroom. 

We’re seeing higher rates of bullying since schools reopened after the pandemic. The Asbury Park Press reports today that in shore districts “investigations into race-based bullying and harassment was up 25% while investigations into harassment involving gender and sexual identity was up about 42% last year compared to the year before the pandemic.” (The paper compiled the numbers itself because the New Jersey Department of Education “does not present that information in a collective way.”)

Throughout the state, bullying incidents were up 29% compared to 2018-2019, the last full school year before the COVID-19 pandemic (although sometimes, as in Asbury Park, the bully is an adult).

Rates are up throughout the country: many educators, according to Education Week, say they are facing “an uptick in student misbehavior that appears to be associated with challenges related to the return to in-person learning after extended periods of remote or hybrid instruction.”

What should school leaders do, especially as our political polarization worsens and once inexcusable behavior (especially on social media)  goes mainstream?

There are two research-based approaches for reducing bullying: Changing the school climate and having an effective social-emotional learning program. Here is advice from the Children’s Health Council:

School Climate:

• Schools with a positive climate foster healthy development, while a negative school climate is associated with higher rates of student bullying, aggression, victimization, and feeling unsafe.
• The elements of a positive climate may vary, but may often include norms about feelings and relationships, power and how it is expressed, and media consumption.
• Students consistently report that teachers miss most incidents of bullying and fail to help students when asked. A majority of teachers report that they feel unprepared to deal with classroom bullying. Some teachers bully students themselves, or show a lack of empathy toward children who are bullied. Teachers report that they receive little guidance in “classroom management,” and sometimes default to the disciplinary strategies they learned in their own families growing up.

Social-Emotional Learning

• Evidence-based social-emotional learning (SEL) approaches have been shown to deliver cost-effective, solid results. Numerous meta-analyses, research reviews, and individual studies of hundreds of thousands of K-12 students show that SEL improves emotional well-being, self-regulation, classroom relationships, and kind and helpful behavior among students. It reduces a range of problems like anxiety, emotional distress, and depression; reduces disruptive behaviors like conflicts, aggression, bullying, anger, and hostile attribution bias; and it improves academic achievement, creativity, and leadership.
• Teachers also benefit from SEL. Those with emotional and social skills training have higher job satisfaction and less burnout, show more positive emotions toward their students, manage their classrooms better, and use more strategies that cultivate creativity, choice, and autonomy in their students. Teachers report that they want more SEL support to cultivate their own emotional and social skills, and to better understand their students’ feelings. But few teacher training programs focus on growing the teachers’ emotion regulation skills.