With this week marking Bullying Awareness Week, the Sydenahm Current spoke with the Lambton-Kent District School Board about their “bullying” policies.
This story is also in follow-up to a story we ran on September 22nd, entitled:
Wallaceburg family dealing with bullying
Here is the interview between the Sydenham Current (SC) and Dave Doey, superintendent for the Lambton-Kent District School Board who oversees there Safe Schools policy.
SC: What is the policy for the LKDSB regarding bullying, is it board-wide or school-by-school?
Dave Doey: The policy is board-wide and the policy governs what we call Safe Schools, so it incorporates bullying but it also incorporates a code of conduct, the concept of progressive discipline and the policy flows from provincial legislation. There are sections of the Education Act thatre dedicated specifically to safe school consideration. All of our policies and regulations flow from the legislation.
SC: Do you take the legislation and adapt or cater it to a specific school or community?
Dave Doey: The policy and regulations that we have, the policies are the Board’s position relative to something and the regulations are the rules and guidelines that govern how we will respond in situations relating to whatever the policy is about. So, those guidelines and expectations are the same for all of our schools. In fact, our guidelines and expectations are consistent with what you would find in any board in the province of Ontario. Consistency is really important in terms of everybody working off of the same page.
Where there may be differences is in the application of the strategies or the guidelines or the expectations of the regulations. Every situation is going to be different and we’re dealing with individual students. It depends on the circumstances, it depends on the students, what happened. Every circumstance has to be taken based on what it is about. The consistent part is in terms of the expectations we have with in regard with how our principals would approach each situation.
SC: You hear a lot about the term “zero tolerance” when dealing with bullying situations involving physical violence or name-calling, etc. Does the LKDSB practice this concept?
Dave Doey: Zero tolerance is a phrase that has been kicking around for probably 25 years. Many of our parents would have been students in school when the phrase “zero tolerance” came out and at the time the Safe Schools legislation 25 years ago was pretty strict in terms of consequences. There were a lot of responses that principals were expected to invoke, depending on the circumstances, there were more must-do’s back then.
I’ve always said zero tolerance means there will be a visible response in any situation where behaviour has created a concern for others. So whether that is bullying or any other circumstance. Zero tolerance does not mean that the students involved will automatically be subject to suspension or that any specific consequence will necessarily be attached to that circumstance. It means we will respond proportional to the behaviour in a given situation and the needs of the students.
SC: What type of supports are out there for parents and for students that have been subject to being bullied? How can the school board help them?
Dave Doey: You’ve raised an important question. It’s not enough for us to simply respond to a situation, investigate what happened, and need out appropriate consequences, supports have to be involved for all of the students.
Certainly students who have been targeted in bullying behaviour, there are different things that could come into play. One, we certainly want to involve the parents and get a read on exactly what the impact has been on the student and work with the parent to help ensure that the student has a sense of their own security, well-being. Reinforce that we are there to support them and we have their best interest in mind.
If need be, we have specialized Board staff who can help them develop particular skills that they can use in different situations. We can work with the parents and refer them to outside agencies if that would be helpful as well… it is not all done in-house.
By the same token we want to support students that have engaged in bullying behaiviour. Not only is it not a good thing for the kids that have been targeted, in the end it is not good for the kids that have done the bullying, because they are setting themselves apart in negative ways. We have a responsibility with them in working with their parents to help them see that there are better ways to interact with their peers, there are better ways to present themselves. There are more effective, more productive, more contributing dynamics that they can be part of as opposed to the choices they have made, which create negative outcomes in so many different ways.
SC: What are the steps that parents need to take to get this support from the LKDSB?
Dave Doey: The best access point is the principal. Let’s assume that bullying has occurred. The school is aware of it and has responded, parents have been involved, either they have been involved by reporting it or the school has called the parent to report that this has occurred. What the school will do, they’ll monitor the situation going forward. Checking in regularly with the students that have been targeted to ensure that there has not been a repeat. Monitoring the engagement of kids that have been bullying in the days following. Coaching them in terms of better choices that can be made, those kinds of things.
Where an experience has appeared to be more troubling for a student, we have a team of counselors, with parent permission, students can be referred to the counselors to have a dialogue and to work through some things, if that would be helpful.
We’ll work on social skills. Work on providing the students with some positive outlets. There is a combination of things that we can put in play, it depends on what the needs of the students are. It’s often a step-by-step sort of thing. You put some supports in place, see how the kids respond. If things are improving that is good, if we need to do more then we dig in a little deeper. In all of that, we want to do in conjunction with the parents.
SC: What are some of the steps the LKDSB takes in terms of consequences for students engaging in bullying behaviour?
Dave Doey:Â There are two parts to answering that question.
Our overall response to inappropriate student behaiviour is to use a progressive discipline approach, a progressive intervention approach. You can have younger students engaging in what we would consider to be bullying, but don’t have the maturity to appreciate that the impact of their behaiviour on others or what the potential consequences of that might be. We would lean towards kids in those developmental stages, helping them understand how certain choices create certain impacts on others… and teach them. When you look at the root of the work discipline, it’s about teaching. We always want to come from that perspective. So whatever developmental stage, there is a component that revolves around helping them understand better and have a greater appreciation of the impact of their choices on others.
If we have a situation where a student has engaged in bullying behaiviour, and perhaps in spite of best efforts over a period of time to help a student become more aware, the principal decides in this situation that the students needs to be suspended. Suspension is an option that principals have, depending on the circumstances, that they may feel is appropriate.
The Safe Schools legislation, and this is in our Safe Schools policy as well, there are a couple of provisos. The first is, if a student has been suspended for bullying and they continue to engage in bullying behaiviour and are suspended subsequently for that, we then have to consider whether a referral for expulsion would be appropriate to the circumstances. There are graduated consequences that are pretty significant. So we can suspend for bullying and if a student has been suspended and is subject to suspension again for bullying then we are in the position we have to consider whether or not referring the students for expulsion would be appropriate. The same is true whether a particular students continued presence in the school created, in the principals opinion, an unacceptable risk to the safety of another person. We have a proviso in our Safe Schools policy that allows us a range for a placement of a student in a different program or a different school, if we feel that them remaining at the original school created an unacceptable risk to the safety of another person.
SC: Has this ever been implemented before by the LKDSB?
Dave Doey: We’ve responded to a fairly broad range of situations involving bullying and we are prepared and have been prepared to exercise the application of our Safe Schools policy to its fullest extent, but every decision that is made is specific to the particular circumstances
