U.S. Department of Justice Has Released Guidance On Bullying In Schools: Bullying As the Most Underreported Safety Problem and Greatest Problem Affecting Student's Sense of Security
The Department of Justice has just released guidance to help schools examine and respond to the issue of school bullying. In light of Connecticut’s strong anti-bullying laws and its new requirements that schools implement proactive strategies and conduct annual in-service training for certified staff on the topic, administrators are encouraged to view in its entirety the recently released U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Community Policing Services (COPS) guidance entitled “Bullying in Schools”. See www.cops.usdoj.gov.
The COPS guide is comprehensive and identifies and defines the problem of bullying in schools focusing on the extent of the problem, examines bullying behavior, incidents of bullying, characteristics of bullies, victims, chronic victims, consequences and also provides guidance to schools on how to assess its local problem, how to learn to ask the right questions, and offers suggestions for proactive strategies and suggestions for measuring the effectiveness of those strategies also citing strategies that are not effective. Administrators’ interest in the COPS guidance should be heightened by the reported conclusions that neither class or school size, or school setting, be it urban or suburban, has influence on the level of bullying, but that a school principal’s involvement helps to determine the level of bullying in a particular school.
