I agree it sucks that they have to move.  They're in a way being bullied by the school district.  And they should stand up for them.  But it seems kind of sad that it will come at the expense of their kid.  I guess one could argue that they're setting a good example for their child, but it sounds like they havn't really been successful.  And I wonder at the emotional trauma this kid will have for years after he grows up.

The other thing I always wonder about, and worry about, are the bullies themselves.  I think I read somewhere that young bullies usually grow up to be bullies as adults.    

I went to the registration open house for the local middle school where Alex will go next year (waaaaaaaa!) and the principal who I loved right away indicated that their biggest issue on campus is with bullying. This middle school is grades 7 & 8. There is a full set of instructions for students, staff & parents that you have to sign focused solely on bullying. It scared me of course..but I was also impressed that the administration was admitting this was indeed a major issue and that they are taking active steps to deal with it.

How horrible that this school's administrators are keeping their heads in the sand and allowing kids to be hurt like this! I'm glad that mother is suing.

but WTF? He's been bullied & beaten up repeatedly, the school does nothing, he's been knocked out and required stitches, and he still goes to that school? And he's a special needs student. Oh my holy hell. Get him the f*ck out of that school...move, find a different school, home school, but get him out. I will be so up the butt of our school district if I see any bullying being tolerated. No lie. Zero tolerance as far as I'm concerned.

Seriously, how many times would your kid need to be beaten up before you pulled him/her out????

Sorry to rant....

up in arms about schools who not only will do nothing to help the victim of bullying, but also seem to be abetting the bullies.  We had this happen.  I eventually pulled my kids from that school, but I wish I had done it sooner.  My younger kids were not effected by student bullying, but my older son really went through a couple of very bad years...and because I constantly complained, I was viewed as part of the problem.

The two bullies lived in our neighborhood.  Twin boys a year older than my son.  I don't know why they hated my son so much...never understood that.  I saw what they were early on.  Many other parents didn't, until they'd have these two at their homes and find things missing after they'd left.  So, no matter, we were left to deal with these two at home, but at school, well, it crossed the line.

Typical example:  one day, when my son was maybe seven or eight, he found a golf ball down at the bus stop.  The bully boys demanded that he hand it over.  He didn't.  One tried to grab it out of his hand and he held him off in such a way that the kids glasses fell off.  I got a call from the school telling me that my son was being suspended from the bus for a week.  The principal didn't question my son (and other kids at the bus stop's) side of the story, rather, he said he was punishing my son because he didn't just give these two the golf ball.  I asked why he should have been expected to do that...the answer?  "Well, does your son play golf?  If not, why would he need a golf ball, anyway?"  Sometimes people are just beyond reasoning with.  And yeah...I was the one considered to be the "trouble making parent".

I have to say that while I'd launch a lawsuit that'd blister the school's eyebrows off, I'd also yank my kid out to prevent long-term self-esteem issues.

I was bullied quite a bit in middle school as well - emotionally rather than physically, to be sure. I was a nerdy girl who had a penchant for speaking my mind, particularly to the jock/popular cliques. Should've kept my head down and gotten on with things, but not my style, you know? (you're all surprised, I'm sure) There was a concerted campaign to harass me by about 12 classmates, most of them girls, when I was in 7th grade, (prank calls to my folks house, whispers at me in the halls, trouble finding a table to sit at in the lunchroom) culminating with threatening letters shoved into my locker. My parents were frantic that no one was doing anything, and when she finally got a meeting with the head guidance councilor, his verdict was that I'd been writing the letters myself in a bid for attention. Never mind the fact that they were in different inks and handwriting. His evidence that I'd been doing it? Some of the letters were written in pink ink with little hearts over the "i"s. Well, there you go.

My folks did seriously talk to me about transferring out of the school and going to a private school, but I thought that I'd probably have equally as rough a time at a private school as the new girl - better the devil you know. Things tapered off by the time I got to high school, thankfully.

One thing I don't understand is when a crime occurs on a school or university campus, why the school or university "owns" the situation. Somehow they have jurisdiction over what is basically an assault? I think it's just tradition to defer to the school, and it makes no sense. Does anyone know if there is law around this?

In this situation, I would call the police myself and say I have an assault to report. I know who did it, and there are witnesses. Forget these fools at the school. Have the police do an investigation. This poor kid has been knocked unconscious and has required stitches - repeatedly!! Police will look at who assaulted who, period.

I would certainly sue the school over their inaction. And sue the families as well.

And I would most certainly take my kid out of the school. I wonder if this family needs this school because of their kid's learning disability. Still, I would pull my kid out and work it out with a sympathetic private school, anything.

Awful.

does amazing stuff with helping kids stop being victims- and bullies.  He comes from the Waldorf world, but his approach is amazing and works in public schools as well- I'd recommend it to anyone dealing with a kid who's a victim or a kid who's a bully.  His Social Inclusion approach teaches kids, parents, teachers- everyone- how to get out of what he calls the "bullying maze-" the roles and expectations that lock some kids into the bullying role and others into the victim role.  You can find him at The Child Today.  I'm already studying his stuff for the time when DS faces it- he's got target written all over him.

and bullying was not tolerated, though it's different in a single-sex environment. My daughters attended the same school as I did and even 20 years later, the administration had things pretty well in hand.

But blood spilled, stitches? Get that kid out of the f---ing school now! What are they waiting for, a near-death experience? Absolutely ridiculous.

I was waiting for the kids to go to bed so I could write about this.  I saw this article this morning and flew into an (internal) rage.  

What I immediately thought about was the fact that kids like him do occasionally strike back.  When they do, all sympathy is gone.  If Billy Wolfe brought a gun to school tomorrow and shot his bullies and the faculty who have allowed it, the dead would suddenly be saints who were shot by an evil boy.  Aside from the fact that perhaps a murderous reaction would be more understandable than a suicidal one, would the world really be at a loss if Billy Wolfe's bullies weren't in it?  Most of them have little chance of growing up to be decent people.  

I've studied bullying a bit and learned that the long held belief that bullies act as they do as a result of low self-esteem is, in fact, a load of rich creamery butter.  They may or may not have low self-esteem, but the traits that bind most or all bullies are lack of empathy and an exaggerated sense of entitlement.  In other words, they are jerks.  Self-esteem is neither here nor there.  May have very high self-esteem--it's others they have low esteem for.  

When I am feeling this black and white about a situation, I try to remind myself to stop, put down my pitchfork, take a deep breath and consider the fact that there may be more to it than meets the eye.  Even with the Megan Meier story, inside I thought about the fact that the media and the general public could, in fact, be wrong.  But with both Meier and Wolfe, I'm having a very hard time with that.

Oh, and so as not to waste the small amount of research I did when I was going to write about this, here's a link I found interesting.

horrific because he has suffered this type of abuse for years.  and negligent because his parents are so busy fighting the system while their boy gets beat up... i am hoping there is a plan at work while they wait for things to improve, but it certainly does not sound that way.

but i'd like to bring up another side to the anti-bullying/zero-tolerance argument.  my son attends a small quaker school.  he has eight third graders in his class.  one little girl picks her nose. so my son's buddy developed a signal (can you guess what it might have been?) for when this happened.  when the signal was given, both boys would giggle.  

so i get a call from his young teacher on a saturday before scheduled conferences about an incident that just couldn't wait.  she doesn't tell me the details (privacy... no name of the girl, no idea what she was doing... just that the boys were signaling and laughing).  would i please deal with this? i did talk to sam... told him how he was not allowed to be unkind, not allowed to make fun of someone, and how unlike him that was.  he knows i was not happy.  sam is an extremely kind, sweet kid, but he is still 8 years old.  the boys had to conference with the teacher, the school counselor and the head of school over this issue.  

so... i personally DO anti-bullying work with schools.  i teach pre-service and in-service teachers about how the social curriculum is EVRY BIT as important as the academic curriculum.  i am a morning meeting, conflict resolution, peace table, kind of gal.  but to me, the nose stuff was kids being kids.  to the school, it is part of anti-bullying.. the slippery slope... the fact that it was two kids against one.  i have talked with other parents (not just in small quaker schools) who have had similarly normal developmental occurrences labeled as bullying.  is everything unpleasant that goes on between kids bullying?  

i am VERY grateful that we now label emotional bullying as bullying... the social abuse can be even more difficult to  heal than physical wounds.... but are we also over-identifying bullying?

My parents are going through this now with my 17yo sister. There's one particular bully at the school, and he targets mostly girls (and one special needs boy as well). He has kicked, hit, and even stabbed (with a fork) others. The school has known about the problem for at least two years. Yet they've done nothing about it but blame the victims. It flies in the face of all logic -- there are at least seven other kids who have been assaulted by this boy. In each case the mother (and all of these kids just happened to live with single working mothers) complained to the school several times, but gave up when she hit the wall of school officials who placed the blame on her child. I was at a couple of meetings with school officials regarding my sister, and I can't blame these parents for giving up. The principal and even the superintendent are so condescending and hateful, and they insinuated more than once to us that my sister is the one who should be punished somehow, even though this boy kicked her as hard as he possibly could in front of a class full of other students, screamed obscenities at her, then threw his textbooks at the teacher when she came back into the room.

But my parents don't give up. As a previous poster suggested, they called the police themselves to report the assault, went to court to get a restraining order against the boy, then went to court again to defend the restraining order when the boy's parents contested it. They transferred my sister to another school about 15 miles away, and they're suing the old school, not only for negligence and failure to protect students, but they've also demanded that the old school pay for the non-resident tuition that's required at the new school -- basically, they forced her to switch schools, so they should pay for the new school. They've also gotten statements from the seven other parents, and are considering expanding the suit to include those families.

Another obstacle to dealing with the schools in bullying situations is that it's really hard to find a lawyer who will agree to sue the school system, at least here in semi-rural Indiana. Nearly every lawyer we talked to wouldn't take the case because a) it's hard to win against a school, and b) he or she has school-age kids and doesn't want to rock the boat, or c) the general consensus is that suing a school with board members who are important members of the community is a good way to commit career suicide. We finally found a lawyer who lives more than an hour away and specializes in this kind of case. But it took months.

... all too many school administrators/teachers/bus drivers just do the easiest thing.  A fight!  What is the easiest way out?  And all too often, it is coming down on the one being bullied.  (Bullies and their parents are often loudmouths who make trouble.)  Somehow, America equates a bully with a "strong, rugged person."  

I sometimes had to deal with bullies with my sons -- never my daughter.  But it DOES happen with girls, too.  Every time, with a bully at least a few years older.  What gives with that?  Does it make you tough to beat up a smaller/younger kid?  Every time that happened, I'd say to them (if I came across it), "You are too weak to fight someone your own age/size?  Are you a wimp or what?"  And no, that isn't the best way to handle it, but sometimes my anger got the best of me.  In most cases, I nagged the school relentlessly (if it happened at school), or their parents, if not at school.  It didn't always work, but the bullying stopped, probably because the school/parents wanted to get rid of ME.  So much of school action is doing whatever gets the least hassle for them.