Schools nationwide are struggling with social media in many ways, and not simply with the student sexting issue and cyberbullying that has resulted in teen suicide.
Many schools these days have a presence on Web sites such as Facebook and Twitter to improve instant communication with the community, but far more of their students are also online, which can lead to some serious consequences for all involved.
Video was again at the center of yet another school bus fight, this time in Jackson, Miss. It showed one student standing above another seated student, seemingly taunting him and then sucker-punching him in the face. When the 16-year-old victim tried to defend himself, or get away, others joined in on the fracas. Making matters worse, the video was soon posted on Facebook.
The boy’s mother is now threatening the school district with a civil lawsuit for not doing anything to stop the beating, which she said was an ongoing problem over the entire school year that her son had been having with the other boy shown on the video. She’s also upset that her son received a one-week suspension from school, the same discipline given to the other students. Kakeyla Manning is also considering criminal charges against her son’s attacker.
“That right there should have been taken care of a long time ago.”
Never mind that the CDC said that 160,000 students each year stay away from school because of bullying or that Massachusetts appears very close to passing an anti-bullying law, if that’s even possible to enforce with children, on all school grounds including school buses. One of the leading reasons parents keep their children off of school buses in the first place is due to on-board violence and bullying, according to the American School Bus Council.
Now, increasingly using sites like Facebook, the bullied face the added embarrassment of their peers watching these episodes online. And schools are facing the added sting of seeing their student behavior policies, or lack thereof, aired in an open forum. Without knowing all of the details, there still appear to some serious issues at play in this incident.
If this bullying was an ongoing problem, why was it allowed to continue, especially on the bus? Why no seating assignment? Why wasn’t the driver notifying her supervisor, or the school principal, about the bullying? How do school districts deal with student video or other posts on sites like Facebook and Myspace, especially which flout apparent problems with policies such as student bullying?
The answers could prove quite costly.
