Bullying at Bios

After thirty-five years of dealing, working with, or talking to/listening about bullying, I think I have figured out how to solve the problem. Find the person who teaches the class that seemingly all bullies and people who are bullied must take and insist this school for bullies quit their evil practice.

This mythical teacher of "How to Bully" is an excellent instructor. It seems that all bullies are taught to use the same lines to intimidate their prey and are given identical speeches to protect themselves from consequences. All bullies learn the same lines to deny the bullying. All victims of bullying blame themselves for the bully’s actions, or express their fears of reprisals if action against the bully is taken. As far as I can understand this bullying thing, there is just one “Bully School”, with one set of lines for each action in the bullying process. Truly, most of the time I can finish the spoken lines of the bully and the bullied when I talk to them. They don't seem surprised when I do, probably because they think I attended the same bullying class as they did.

When they are confronted or caught, the lines for bullies are, " I was just kidding" or “We were only playing around". From adults, phrases such as "They must have misheard me" or "You know I would never talk that way" are common.

The bullied sometimes say things like the following after being bullied physically: "It was probably my fault" or "I deserved it" or when told that the bully needs to be confronted, with my support, the line given 100% of the time is, "I fear they will retaliate against me."

I was telling someone recently that the thought had crossed my mind that with the first school I started, it was about the time of reaching two hundred students that bullying in both of it's common forms, physical and verbal, had begun. And sure enough, now that Bios is at about 200 students, both forms of bullying hit with a vengeance in the past three weeks. One ending in the expelling of a student and another is in the process of being addressed.

There are some basic concepts to confronting bullying. But there is no stopping it because of the sinful natures we are born with. I firmly believe that bullying can be minimized and kept as an exceptional event and not the rule.

I, as the principal, need to develop a community that trusts I will not tolerate bullying and that I will aggressively work towards that end.

It is never that simple though. Sometimes it is difficult to catch a bully when the concern is witnessed between only two people. Part of my job is to protect the accused also, in case the accusations are not true.

The idea of developing and maintaining good communicational relationships between the teachers and the parents is another concept we encourage at Bios. Bios Christian Academy is set up so the families have the same teacher or teachers for up to three years. This hopefully builds up a sense of trust, shared experiences, and communication which allows for changes in a student’s moods or school work to be brought sooner to the attention of both sets of adults that are involved in that student’s life.

Finally, when a bullying situation occurs, our hope is not only the stopping of the bullying but the restoration of the broken relationship caused by it. It cannot always end that way, but that is my hope.

But for us, as a Christian community, the first action to prevent bullying is prayer and trusting our Lord for his answer. Our actions are dulled without this. Also remember that Jesus says that those around us will know we are Christians by our love. We should be a people characterized by our love for another. As a general rule I have seen that in our families and I expect Bios will continue to be characterized by love.