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Schools

Minneapolis Schools Lead State Anti-bullying Efforts

The school district counters bullying—an issue that gained prominence with the suicides of a number of gay teens across the country—through a combination of teacher intervention and peer support.

Despite progressive anti-bullying policies in the Minneapolis school district, much of the hard work of opposing bullying—especially of gay and lesbian students—falls to classmates.

Southwest High School's 'once is enough' policy
The district has been training every teacher to serve as a first line of defense against bullying since 2003, according to the district's in-house gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender advocate, Jessi Tebben. If a building has a recurring bullying problem, Tebben's office—called Out4Good—gets called in to help.

The specific policies don't prevent bullying outright as much as they help teachers and administrators focus on curing the bullying problem, Tebben said. Once the current policies were put in place, Tebben said, the district focused on the question of how you train teachers to prevent bullying: "How do you get staff to understand aspects of bullying and violence in a school district?"

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At Southwest High School, Principal Bill Smith said he and the staff make sure they intervene early and often.

"Kids are kids - no questions about that," Smith said. "Sometimes they say awfully cruel things and I'd be absolutely naive to think we don't have kids who slip up and make those kinds of comments."

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"Once is enough—we make it clear that it's not going to be tolerated here," he said. We'll get the help we need; we'll call in mom and dad; if we need to call police for harassment we will."

Most of the time, Smith said, a situation will not get that far.

"We'll chat with the kids [responsible for bullying] and say, 'This is the damage you're doing. Is that really how you want to run your life?'...or their friends will intervene."

Even if the school has not had a major incident of bias-based bullying in recent years, Smith said low-level sniping still goes on, frequently via text message or Facebook. 

Smith said Southwest has a big advantage over other urban high schools when it comes to preventing bullying—nearly all students there start in ninth grade, and finish in twelfth grade, meaning the staff doesn't need to introduce new students every year to the school's "once is enough" policies.

There is some statewide acknowledgment that bullying of gay youth is a problem. Just last week, the Minnesota School Board Association recommended that school districts across the state expand anti-bullying policies to cover gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students. 

Even Minneapolis could go further to protect students. Tebben said one of her main goals this year it to convince the district to keep track of how many students are bullied because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. 

Classmates spearhead anti-bullying efforts
Despite recent media attention on anti-gay bullying, preventing bullying can be frustrating. Emily Butler, a former student at South High School, worked in a peer educator program run by Out4Good until she graduated in 2009.

Butler said she joined the peer educator program because she routinely heard her fellow students casually call each other words like "fag."

"Some teachers and students wouldn't say anything, and treat it like it was no big deal," she said. "But then there's this gay freshman who feels super uncomfortable and offended."

As a peer educator, Butler visited other Minneapolis high schools to give mandatory classes for her fellow students on the power behind slurs, or about ways to prevent bullying.

"The teachers were wonderful for inviting us to speak," she said, but the students would sometimes ignore her. "They would get up and go to the bathroom, or they would be playing on their cell phones the whole time."

In other cases, Butler said, the classes seemed change students perspectives. She and 40 of her peers held a mandatory, school-sponsored series of classes on homophobia, classism, sexism and racism. While Butler graduated a few months after the classes were held, she thinks they they spurred progress.

"It seemed like teachers were getting more involved in it, and students seemed like they were taking some initiative to correct each other or start a dialogue," she said.

Tebben said peers can sometimes be most effective at changing a school's culture. 

"Families and kids can do a lot to change school climate, and students outnumber staff by a lot," Tebben said.  "If we can mobilize families and kids to set the tone and the norms, we can get a lot done."

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