Bullying

EVERY school administrator, athletic director, coach and teacher should be required to watch and be tested on the specifics of this excellent, but terribly tragic, video. Additionally, school personnel who intentionally ignore the issues of bullying and its horrific effects on the victims under their watch OR who simply deny that bullying "occurs" at their schools and choose to brand as liars those few brave victims who DO summon the courage to come forward should, at a minimum, be placed on an extended probationary period if not fired immediately. As this video makes abundantly clear, bullying occurs at ALL schools, and to argue otherwise, is simply an attempt to protect a school's reputation AT ALL COSTS, including the possible loss of a child-victim to suicide. POTENTIAL FINANCIAL LIABILITY AND NEGATIVE PRESS SHOULD BE THE LAST THING ON A SCHOOL ADMINISTRATOR'S MIND WHEN ALLEGATIONS OF BULLYING AND/OR TITLE VI HARASSMENT ARE RAISED IN ANY MANNER. Additionally, it is egregiously shameful when a school administrator appoints an employee, untrained in both the elements of a Title VI violation and proper investigative techniques, who is friends with the school employees who turned a blind eye to the victim's plight when they received actual notice of the violations. While I am on my soap box, I may as well also question why a school "investigator" would delay for nearly a year the interview process for witnesses whose names and contact information were provided by the victim--when if the investigator had received only minimal training would immediately recognize the need (actually a requirement) to investigate such cases as expeditiously as possible, recognizing that long delays between the bullying/harassment incidents themselves and the actual interviews conducted many, many months later would result in a patently flawed investigation because the delays in interviewing witnesses would necessarily adversely affect a witness' memory of the specific factual information he/she clearly knew at one time.

I apologize for my rant, but I simply cannot accept that any child should be treated as a throw-away, by-product/casualty because of a school administrator whose primary goal is maintaining a positive reputation for his school district even if doing so results in emotional damage or even death by suicide of the victim brave enough to come forward with a complaint.