Anti-bullying laws lack any regular enforcement

ATLANTA | Recent student suicides have parents and advocates complaining that anti-bullying laws enacted in nearly every state are not being enforced and do not go far enough to identify and rid schools of chronic tormentors.

Forty-four states expressly ban bullying, a legislative legacy of a rash of school shootings in the late ‘90s, yet few if any of those measures have identified children who excessively pick on their peers, an Associated Press review has found. Also, few offer any method for ensuring the policies are enforced, according to data compiled by the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The issue came to a head in April when 11-year-old Jaheem Herrera committed suicide at his Atlanta-area home after his parents say he was tormented repeatedly in school. Officials denied it, and an independent review found bullying wasn’t a factor, a conclusion his family rejects.

Regardless, Georgia’s law, among the toughest in the nation, still would not have applied. It applies only to students in grades six through 12. Jaheem was a fifth-grader.

Georgia’s law has one of the largest gaps between what it requires of school districts and the tools it gives them for meeting those requirements. The state doesn’t collect data specifically on bullying occurrences despite legislation that promises to strip state funding from schools that fail to take action after three instances involving a bully.

After Jaheem’s death, other parents came forward to say their children had been bullied and that school officials had done nothing with the complaints, rendering the state’s law useless.

“There is a systematic problem,” said Mike Wilson, who said his 12-year-old daughter was bullied for two years in the same school district where Jaheem died. “The lower-level employees, the teachers, the principals, are trying to keep this information suppressed at the lowest possible level.”

Just six states — Montana, Hawaii, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, North Dakota and South Dakota — and the District of Columbia lack specific laws targeting school bullying, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Most states require school districts to adopt open-ended policies to prohibit bullying and harassment.

While some direct state education officials to form model policies that school districts should mimic, they offer little to assure that the policies are enforced; only a handful of states require specific data-gathering meant to assure bullying is being monitored, for instance.

“The states themselves can’t micromanage a school district — but they can say to a school district, ‘Look, you have to have consequences,’” said Brenda High, whose Web site, Bully Police USA, tracks anti-bullying laws across the nation and who advocates for strict repercussions for bullies. The Washington state-based advocate’s son, Jared, was 13 when he committed suicide in 1998 after complaining of bullying.

“It needs to be written into the law that bullying has the same consequences as assault,” she said. “The records and such need to be kept so that if the child is a chronic bully, they — after so many instances — will end up in an alternative school.”

Alaska and Georgia have particularly specific statutes. Alaska’s Department of Education and Early Development must compile annual data on bullying complaints and report its findings to the Legislature.

Georgia’s 10-year-old law goes a step further. It specifies that three instances of bullying is grounds for transfer to an alternative school, away from the victim. School systems not in compliance forfeit state funding, according to the law.

Despite that record-keeping provision, the Georgia Department of Education cannot say whether any child has been transferred as a result of bullying because the department only tracks the number for broader offenses, including fighting and threats, spokesman Dana Tofig said.

“If the district is not enforcing its own bullying policy, and that’s been happening repeatedly, the law says [it] can lose [its] state funding,” Miss Tofig said.

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