HIB: Empowering new kinds of bullies
Early in 2011, New Jersey instituted rigid school anti-bullying laws that require schools to follow strict guidelines about HIB: harassment, intimidation, and bullying. While the intention is good, HIB’s over-zealousness creates a stifling bureaucracy for educators, and these blanket regulations, in their effort to eliminate the child bully, are perhaps empowering other types of bullies.
Before I proceed, I want to make a few things clear. I don’t want three kids beating up one kid after school. I don’t want 100-pound second graders tilting other kids upside down until lunch money pours on the floor. I don’t want a kid or groups of kids using digital venom to poison another child’s reputation. More than anything, I don’t want children to do something drastic to themselves or others because of unchecked malice. No one wants these things.
However, I do want us to allow educators to educate children. HIB has created a new level of bureaucracy—right in your school, folks!—requiring high-paid, well-trained, smart administrators to spend their days sifting through piles—piles—of HIB paperwork, splitting hairs about issues such as if poopyheads are a protected class of children whose rights are violated when other kids call them “poopyheads.” If the answer is “maybe,” then if Suzy called Jimmy a “poopyhead,” Jimmy and Suzy and Suzy’s parents and Jimmy’s parents could be summoned before the “court” of your school board to sort it all out. Note, that a hearing about this poopyheadedness must happen within a 10-day time frame, which may require special assemblies of the board of education and your administrators.
HIB is regulation run amok. Over-extended, draconian bullying rules create confusion and fear in schools. As a parent and school board member, I am struck by how successful already in-place anti-bullying campaigns have been. Kids I know say the word “bully” with total disdain, almost like “murderer.”
Schools are gatherings of large groups of human beings, a remarkably cussed species, so, yes, we will have bullies. How bad is the problem? A recent Pew study, “Teens, Kindness and Cruelty on Social Network Sites,” found 69% of teens said their peers are mostly nice to each other online, yet 88% have witnessed peer-to-peer meanness or cruelty and 15% have been the target themselves. However, 90% ignored this behavior, 80% defended a victim, and 79% told someone to stop it. The study reports an interesting mix of behaviors. On the one hand, kids are mean to each other — surprise! — and can now be mean using social media. However, without being pummeled by regulation, the vast majority of kids are willing to stand up for what’s right.
Children need to learn to deal with all kinds of problem behaviors. Now, when a kid is insulted, we mobilize an educational bureaucracy to his or rescue. I wonder if we are further short-circuiting children’s ability to deal with adversity.
And HIB laws, in an attempt to ferret out all incidences of one kind of bully, will no doubt embolden another kind, the parent bully. Parents will use HIB to get at others and to, well, bully their schools. You know these people. They’ve already been mucking up the process of running a school, haunting your district’s administrative offices and clogging up meetings with their grievances. The world has been out to get them, and now it’s out to get their children. They are quarrelsome, troublesome, overbearing people, and they will use the mania of HIB to bully school staff out of one of the most precious things they have (and that we all pay for): Their time.
I am not making light of childhood bullying. I wish I could have in some superhero way personally prevented every drastic bullying incident, but I don’t believe HIB regulations will successfully don the hero cape. HIB creates a labyrinthine set of ambiguous or poorly supported rules, including the requirement that cash-strapped schools appoint an HIB administrator to sort through what will largely be nonsense. At a recent school board training I attended, the New Jersey School Board Association lawyers conducting the training said the state had set up a fund to help schools pay for the required HIB administrators, but no money was actually appropriated to that fund. Check out your school: I bet your HIB point-person is someone who already has five other job responsibilities. (By the way, schools are starting to fight back against HIB mandates on this fiscal point.)
As I close, I want to say how I am struck by the way legislative bodies seem hellbent on micromanaging schools and school personnel. I know public schools must be accountable: They are run with public money. But from astonishingly inflexible budget rules to No Child Left Behind to HIB laws, politicians have used threat and coercion to destroy opportunities for common sense-driven decision-making by school personnel. We hire people in schools to teach children. Let them do their jobs.
(I guess it’s just what people care about. While we’re nattering about HIB, some urban schools remain cauldrons of violence, as was well documented in The Philadelphia Inquirer’s recent “Assault on Learning” series. I guess it’s easier, and maybe more politically advantageous, to go after those “poopyhead” haters.)
Overregulation distracts schools from their core mission: Educating children. U.S. schools are certainly not the better for these layers of regulation. In fact, the way that legislators lean on schools makes me think of one thing: Bullying.
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“Schools are gatherings of large groups of human beings, a remarkably cussed species.”
A simple touch of genius there.
From a personal level to a bureaucratic level – “common sense is not a common practice.”
And the power of legislature has gotten so far out of hand that I am not certain the citizenry of the US can even begin to control it but if we don’t try our kids may not lead their own lives but be led by regulation.
Learning to avoid a bully is half the fun of school, think outside the class room you know where most of you “save the author” will spend the rest of your life. If that kid on Sat in philly learned to ball up and take a beating might still be with us. Or at least learn to hit the first guy and run, sucker punch a bully and run, bag full of quarters to the face works equally as well. Ex. see Bad Boys circa 1984 Sean Penns best work before he got all gay. So bascially learn to stand up for yourself or get some nija training see kato-pink panther.
ninja
“Poopyheads” and their haters have existed since the beginning of time. The trend now is to expect schools to solve every problem that exists along a child’s roadway of life. Parents should never depend on an educational system to raise their child. Let’s bring some common sense back into the homes and schools and teach kindness using the golden rule. Then maybe some of this nonsense will stop!
Are you allowed to say “Poopyhead” on here?