We’ve all been bullied. Whether we were too short, too tall, too fat, too thin, spoke with an accent, wore glasses, or somehow looked different from everyone else, we’ve all been a target at some time. The experiences were painful, and sometimes left wounds that still haven’t healed. At St. John the Evangelist School, we are committed to fostering a culture of Christian virtue that doesn’t tolerate bullying. To that end, parents, faculty, and students have formed the Student Concerns Committee and are developing methods to address this serious issue.

How Did We Get Here?
So how do we know that bullying is a problem at our school? Every year students in 5th and 8th grade take the Assessment of Catechesis Religious Education (ACRE) as directed by the National Catholic Education Association. The purpose of this test is to see how well students understand their Catholic faith and how they apply that faith in their everyday lives. For the past three years, scores related to the questions about bullying have steadily increased. This doesn’t mean that our school has become a dangerous place for our children. It’s not. What it does mean is that the students either see or experience what they believe to be bullying, and we need to investigate that further.

Our investigation began on Thursday, August 29, with an open meeting to all parents, teachers, and student leaders, including the Student Council, Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) and Boy Scouts. At the meeting we discovered that bullying includes such behaviors as name calling, exclusion, and physical force. To develop solutions for these issues, we formed the Student Concerns Committee.

What Are We Doing?

We will not solve the problem of bullying overnight. Rather, we are developing a range of short-, medium-, and long-term solutions that we can implement in stages. Already Katie Leiser, our school’s social worker, has surveyed students in Grades 4 through 8 on the issue. Some of her questions included: “What does the word bully mean?”; “Have you ever been bullied? If so, what happened?”; “What would make it easier and/or feel safer to tell an adult?” She is compiling these results, and this valuable student feedback will help shape our solutions.

The committee also has developed draft guidelines for parents performing lunch duty and a form for easily reporting student behavior issues that occur at lunch or recess. We will be e-mailing these draft guidelines to all parents and teachers. Please read them and provide your feedback. Your input is critical to making these guidelines a success.

At subsequent meetings, the committee will discuss solutions for enabling students to report bullying without fear of retribution or blame, as well as methods for helping students to understand when they are being bullied and what they can do about it. Committee members are compiling a library of articles on the topic, for possible posting on the Web site as educational resources for parents. And Sister Kathleen will plan a healing service.

We understand that we will not resolve this issue with a simple set of guidelines or an e-mail. It is something that will take time—time to change the behavior of both the bullies and those who are bullied, and time for us, as parents, faculty, and youth leaders, to examine what we do and how we act in front of our children, students, and classmates.

We hope you will talk to your children about bullying. Remind them that we want to foster a culture of Christian virtue, where everyone can feel safe and flourish. And, please get involved. The Student Concerns Committee wants your input. For information on the next meeting, please contact committee chair Joseph Barone at brim.home@verizon.net. By working together, we can truly say, “Yes. St. John’s was a better place because we were here today.”