"Online Bullies Pull Schools Into The Fray"
(1) The girl’s parents, wild with outrage and fear, showed the principal the text messages: a dozen shocking, explicit threats, sent to their daughter the previous Saturday night from the cellphone of a 12-year-old boy. Both children were sixth graders at Benjamin Franklin Middle School in Ridgewood, N.J. Punish him, insisted the parents.
(2) “I said, ‘This occurred out of school, on a weekend,’” recalled the principal, Tony Orsini. “We can’t discipline him.”
Had they contacted the boy’s family, he asked.
Too awkward, they replied. The fathers coach sports together.
What about the police, Mr. Orsini asked.
They said no, the outcome of a trial would be long and uncertain. They wanted immediate action.They pleaded: “Help us.”
(3) Schools these days are confronted with complex questions on whether and how to deal with cyberbullying, an imprecise label for online activities ranging from teasing texts to harassing group sites. One 2010 study by the Cyberbullying Research Center, an organization founded by two criminologists who defined bullying as "willful and repeated harm” inflicted through phones and computers, said one in five middle-school students had been affected.
(7) “I have parents who thank me for getting involved,” said Mike Rafferty, the middle school principal in Old Saybrook, Conn., “and parents who say, ‘It didn’t happen on school property, stay out of my life.’ ”
(8) According to the Anti-Defamation League, although 44 states have bullying statutes, fewer than half offer guidance about whether schools may intervene in bullying involving “electronic communication,” which almost always occurs outside of school and most severely on weekends, when children have more free time to socialize online. Some states say that local districts should develop cyberbullying prevention programs but the states did not address the question of discipline.
(9) Judges are flummoxed, too, as they wrestle with new questions about protections on student speech and school searches. Can a student be suspended for posting a video on YouTube that cruelly demeans another student? Can a principal search a cellphone, much like a locker or a backpack? It’s unclear. These issues have begun their slow climb through state and federal courts, but so far, rulings have been contradictory, and much is still to be determined.
Middle School Misery
(19) Meredith Wearley, Benjamin Franklin’s seventh-grade guidance counselor, was overwhelmed this spring by dramas created on the Web: The text spats that zapped new best friendships; secrets told in confidence, then broadcast on Facebook; bullied girls and boys, retaliating online.
(20) “In seventh grade, the girls are trying to figure out where they fit in,” Mrs. Wearley said. “They have found friends but they keep regrouping. And the technology makes it harder for them to understand what’s a real friendship.” Because students prefer to use their phones for texting rather than talking, Mrs. Wearley added, they often miss cues about tone of voice. The girls come into her office, depressed, weeping, astonished, betrayed.
(21) “A girl will get mad because her friend was friends with another girl,” Mrs. Wearley said.They show Mrs. Wearley reams of texts, the nastiness accelerating precipitously. “I’ve had to bring down five girls to my office to sort things out,” she said. “It’s middle school.”
(22) Recently, between classes, several eighth-grade girls from Benjamin Franklin reflected about their cyberdramas:
“We had so many fights in seventh grade,” one girl said. “None of them were face-to-face. We were too afraid. Besides, it’s easier to say ‘sorry’ over a text.”
Another concurred. “It’s easier to fight online, because you feel more brave and in control,” she said. “On Facebook, you can be as mean as you want.”
(23) Studies show that online harassment can begin in fourth grade. By high school, students inclined to be cruel in cyberspace are more technologically sophisticated, more capable of hiding their prints. But during middle school, with their erupting skin and morphing bodies, many seventh-grade students have a hard enough time just walking through the school doors. When dozens of kids vote online, which is not uncommon, about whether a student is fat or stupid or gay, the impact can be devastating.
(24) While research shows that traditional at-school bullying is far more pervasive than cyberbullying, each type of hostility can now blur and bleed into the other. Jeff Taylor, principal of Frank Lloyd Wright Intermediate School in West Allis, Wis., wades into cyber-related conflicts at school several times each week.
(25) Recently, a seventh-grade girl held a weekend birthday party and her jealous former friend showed up. By Tuesday night, the uninvited guest had insulted the birthday girl’s dress on Facebook, calling it and the girl’s mother cheap. The remarks were particularly wounding, because the birthday girl’s family is not well-off.
(26) By Wednesday, Mr. Taylor said, “There were rumblings about it in the cafeteria. When kids start posturing and switching lunch tables, you can tell.” He and an assistant tried to calm them.But the posturing continued online. A confrontation at school was planned, and the details were texted. On Friday, during the four minutes between seventh-grade lunch and the next period, 20 girls showed up in a hallway and began shrieking. At least four adults pulled the girls apart and talked them down.
(27) “We must have spent five or six hours on this, throughout the week,” Mr. Taylor said. “We got to the bottom of that pain and rejection. I don’t consider it a waste of time. But at 3:03 those buses were pulling out and you know that as soon as the girls got home, they’d be blasting away about it on Facebook.”
(28) Though resolving cyberwars can be slippery and time-consuming, some schools would like students to report them at the outset, before they intensify. But experts on adolescence note that teenagers are loath to tell adults much of anything.
(29) Some students think they can handle the ridicule themselves. Or are just too embarrassed to speak up. Others fear that parents will overreact.
If the child is texting at school or has a Facebook page without permission, “and now they’re being bullied on it,” said Parry Aftab, executive director of WiredSafety.org, “they can’t admit it to parents. The parents will take away the technology and the kids are afraid of that. Or the parents will underreact. They’ll say: ‘Why read it? Just turn it off!’ ”
(4) Affronted by cyberspace’s escalation of adolescent viciousness, many parents are looking to schools for justice, protection, even revenge. But many educators feel unprepared or unwilling to be prosecutors and judges.
(5) Often, school district discipline codes say little about educators’ authority over student cellphones, home computers and off-campus speech. Reluctant to assert an authority they are not sure they have, educators can appear indifferent to parents frantic with worry.
(6) Whether resolving such conflicts should be the responsibility of the family, the police or the schools remains an open question, evolving along with definitions of cyberbullying itself. Nonetheless, administrators who decide they should help their cornered students often face daunting legal constraints.
The Cyberdetectives
(10) Benjamin Franklin Middle School, a sixth-through-eighth-grade school in a wealthy New Jersey suburb, lives bluntly in the present. A sixth-grade girl dashes to class, wearing a turquoise T-shirt with bold sequined letters: “Texting Is My Favorite Subject.” The seventh-grade guidance counselor says she can spend up to three-fourths of her time mediating conflicts that began online or through text messages.
(11) In April, the burden of resolving these disputes had become so onerous that the principal, Mr. Orsini, sent an exasperated e-mail message to parents that made national news:
“There is absolutely NO reason for any middle school student to be part of a social networking site,” he wrote. If children were attacked through sites or texting, he added, “IMMEDIATELY GO TO THE POLICE!” That was not the response that the parents of the girl who had received the foul messages had wanted to hear.
(12) Mr. Orsini sighed, relenting. After all, the texts were angry and obscene, the parents horrified, the girl badly rattled.
(13) “We can certainly talk to the boy,” the principal said. Investigating a complaint can be like stumbling into a sinkhole. Over the next few days, an assistant principal, Greg Wu; Mr. Orsini; a guidance counselor; a social worker and an elementary school principal were pulled into this one:
(14) The sixth graders had “dated” for a week, before the girl broke it off. The texts she received that Saturday night were successively more sneering, graphic and intimidating. But the exchanges shown to Mr. Orsini were incomplete. Before handing her phone to her parents, the girl erased her replies.
(15) The boy claimed he was innocent, telling Mr. Wu he had lost his cellphone that Saturday. “Yeah, right,” said Mr. Wu.
(16) The boy insisted he had dropped it while riding his bicycle that April afternoon with his brother and his brother’s friend, both fifth graders.By Wednesday, the girl’s father called Mr. Orsini. “How is this boy still in school, near my daughter? Why can’t you suspend him?” The boy was a poor student in language arts classes, yet the text messages were reasonably grammatical. Mr. Wu dictated a basic sentence for the boy to write down. It was riddled with errors.Next, an elementary school principal interviewed the fifth-grade boys separately.
(17) By Thursday, Mr. Orsini telephoned the girl’s parents with his unsettling conclusion:
(18) The boy had never sent the texts. The lost phone had been found by someone else and used to send the messages. Who wrote them? A reference or two might suggest another sixth grader. The identity would remain unknown. Mr. Orsini told the girl’s shaken parents that, aside from offering her counseling, the school, which had already devoted 10 hours to the episode, could do no more. “They were still in so much pain,” Mr. Orsini said. “They wanted us to keep investigating.”
The Legal Battles
(30) Tony Orsini, the Ridgewood principal, learned about a devastating Facebook group last November, two months after it started.
(31) “I had a 45-year-old father crying in my office,” Mr. Orsini said. “He kept asking, ‘Why would someone do this to my son?’ ”
(32) A Facebook page had sprung up about the man’s son, who was new in town. The comments included ethnic slurs, snickers about his sexuality and an excruciating nickname. In short order, nearly 50 children piled on, many of them readily identifiable. “Kids deal with meanness all the time and many can handle it,” said Mr. Orsini, 38, a father of two children. “But it never lasts as long as it does now, online.”
The boy could not escape the nickname. At soccer and basketball games around town, opposing players he’d never met would hoot: “Oh, you’re that kid.”
(33) The boy began missing school. He became ill. After weeks, he reluctantly told his parents. “We don’t always get to address these problems until the damage is done,” Mr. Orsini said. Because the comments had been made online and off-campus, Mr. Orsini believed that his ability to intervene was limited.
(34) Tony Orsini wanted to help his middle school student who was being teased mercilessly on Facebook. But he believed he had to catch the bullies at school.He alerted teachers. At lunch, they spotted the three ringleaders as they forced the boy from their table.“I called them into my office,” Mr. Orsini said, “and talked to them strongly about the lunchroom incident. Then I lied. I said I heard that the cops were looking at a Facebook group they had posted.
(35) “It came down the next day.”He rubbed his face in his hands. “All we are doing is reacting,” he said. “We can’t seem to get ahead of the curve.”
Gathering Evidence
(36) Administrators who investigate students tangled in online disputes often resort to a deft juggle of artfulness, technology and law.
(37) First challenge: getting students to come clean. The second challenge is gathering the evidence itself: looking at material typed on personal cellphones or online accounts. School officials have both greater and lesser investigative authority than the police have over students. Certainly they cannot use lie detectors. But though police officers need probable cause and a warrant to search a student’s locker or backpack, school administrators need only “reasonable suspicion” that a school rule has been violated.The police also need probable cause and a warrant to search social networking sites and cellphones. School officials are uncertain what they need.
(38) “I can’t look into Facebook accounts,” said Jeff Taylor, the middle school principal from West Allis, Wis. If students or parents want him to see something online, “they have to show it to me or bring me a printout.”
(39) But Deb Socia, the principal at Lilla G. Frederick Pilot Middle School in Dorchester, Mass., takes a no-nonsense approach. The school gives each student a laptop to work on. But the students’ expectation of privacy is greatly diminished.
(40) “I regularly scan every computer in the building,” Ms. Socia said. “They know I’m watching. They’re using the cameras on their laptops to check their hair and I send them a message and say: ‘You look great! Now go back to work.’ It’s a powerful way to teach kids: ‘I’m paying attention, you need to do what’s right.’ ”
(41) Administrators are skittish about searching cellphones. In these situations, they generally turn over cellphones to the police.
(42) “The question of searching a cellphone is a gray area,” said Mary Ann McAdam, an assistant principal at Governor Livingston High School in Berkeley Heights, N.J. “We only do it when a student says, ‘so-and-so sent threatening messages.’ Even then, they look through their phones and find it for us. If I felt there might be something on a cellphone, I’d invite parents to go through it with me.”
(43) Legal experts disagree on this issue. Professor James argues that cellphones are like backpacks: if the search’s purpose is reasonably related to a school infraction, like cheating, the principal’s search is legal. Others believe that cellphones belong in another category, protected by electronic communication privacy laws.
While a cellphone search may yield an incriminating text, it may not point to the author.
Glossary:
outrage- anger
explicit- overly rude and inappropriate
occured- happened
awkward- weird, embarrassing
immediate- right now
confronted- faced with
complex- difficult
imprecise- not exactly right or accurate
criminologist- someone who studies crime and criminals
willful- choosing your own path
Glossary:
affronted- insulted
escalation- rise
adolescent- young person who is not an adult
justice- fairness
educators- teachers
prosecuters- lawyers
discipline codes- rules of behavior and consequences
authority- power over someone
reluctant-not willing to
assert- state, say
indifferent- not caring
frantic-wild
resolving- fixing, solving
evolving- changing
administrators- principals
daunting- imtimidating, scary, overwhelming
constraints- limits
Glossary:
affronted- insulted
escalation- rise
adolescent- young person who is not an adult
justice- fairness
educators- teachers
prosecuters- lawyers
discipline codes- rules of behavior and consequences
authority- power over someone
reluctant-not willing to
assert- state, say
indifferent- not caring
frantic-wild
resolving- fixing, solving
evolving- changing
administrators- principals
daunting- imtimidating, scary, overwhelming
constraints- limits
Glossary:
Anti-Defamation League-fights hate and seeks fair treatment for all people
statues- laws
guidance- help
intervene- get onvolved
occurs- happens
severely-worse
prevention- stopping
address- talk about
flummoxed- stumped
demeans- "puts down"
federal courts- courts for the whole country
contradictory- on opposite sides
Glossary:
Anti-Defamation League-fights hate and seeks fair treatment for all people
statues- laws
guidance- help
intervene- get onvolved
occurs- happens
severely-worse
prevention- stopping
address- talk about
flummoxed- stumped
demeans- "puts down"
federal courts- courts for the whole country
contradictory- on opposite sides
Glossary:
Anti-Defamation League-fights hate and seeks fair treatment for all people
statues- laws
guidance- help
intervene- get onvolved
occurs- happens
severely-worse
prevention- stopping
address- talk about
flummoxed- stumped
demeans- "puts down"
federal courts- courts for the whole country
contradictory- on opposite sides