Cyber Bullying & School Bullying

• Bullying among children is aggressive behavior that is intentional and that involves an imbalance of power or strength.
• Bullying can seriously affect the emotional, physical, and academic well-being of children who are bullied.
• Dealing with discipline problems related to bullying incidents can take a good deal of administrators’ and educators’ time during a school day.
• Bullying can contribute to a negative climate in schools.
• Bullying is more prevalent than many adults suspect.

Everyone in the school environment will benefit from implementation of an effective bullying prevention program.

Before implementing any efforts to address bullying or other violence at school, keep in mind that

• Effective programs require strong administrative leadership and ongoing commitment on the part of the adults in the school system.
• Those programs that show the most promise are comprehensive in approach. They involve the entire school community, including families, and can take the forms of school-wide interventions, classroom activities, and individual interventions.
• Bullying prevention efforts should begin early–as children transition into kind–and continue throughout the children’s education.
• Effective bullying prevention programs should have no “end date” but should instead become part of the life of your school. Ongoing staff development is important to sustain bullying prevention programs.

Source: U.S Department of Health and Human Services

A review of bullying prevention programs and feedback from educators in the field led us to suggest 10 strategies that represent “best practice” in bullying prevention and intervention.

1. Focus on the social environment of the school. In order to reduce bullying, it is important to change the social climate of the school and the social norms with regards to bullying. This requires the efforts of everyone in the school environment—teachers, administrators, counselors school nurses other non-teaching staff (such as bus drivers, custodians, cafeteria workers, and/or school librarians), parents, and students.
2. Assess bullying at your school. Adults are not always very good at estimating the nature and prevalence of bullying at their school. As a result, it can be quite useful to administer an anonymous questionnaire to students about bullying. A number of bullying prevention programs listed in the Catalog of Resources include these measures.
3. Obtain staff and parent buy-in and support for bullying prevention. Bullying prevention should not be the sole responsibility of any single individual at a school. To be most effective, bullying prevention efforts require buy-in from the majority of the staff and from parents. However, bullying prevention efforts should still begin even if immediate buy-in from all isn’t achievable. Usually, more and more supporters will join the effort once they see what it’s accomplishing.
4. Form a group to coordinate the school’s bullying prevention activities. Bullying prevention efforts seem to work best if they are coordinated by a representative group from the school. This coordinating team might include:
   • an administrator
   • a teacher from each grade
   • a member of the non-teaching staff
   • a school counselor or other school-based mental health professional
   • a parent

Source: The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)