Education committee endorses legislation to stop bullying

The Indiana Senate Education Committee endorsed legislation Thursday to curb bullying in Indiana schools. The bill calls for a universal definition of bullying and will allow grant money from the Safe Schools Fund to help finance bullying prevention.\n"It's a big problem in our schools today already, but it's growing," said State Sen. Thomas J. Wyss (R-15th District), one of the authors of the bill. \nHe said the bill would create "a subcommittee of the Safe School Committee on how to identify bullying and what to do if it becomes a problem."\nEach Indiana school, grades K-12, is already required to have a Safe School Committee in place. Gale Hill, principal of Bloomington's Tri-North Middle School, said she feels like her school is already handling bullying sufficiently.\n"We work on it all the time," Hill said. "Bullying is harassment, and our school handbook has six pages on handling harassment,"\nHe added that females increasingly have become both likely to bully and susceptible to harassment from bullies.\n"It starts with name calling," Wyss said, "but we have also had instances of physical harm done to young female students," \nParents of children who were victims of serious harassment instances gave testimony on the Senate floor, which Wyss knew would touch the Education Committee.\n"In addition to the horrific instances of school shootings that we have all heard of, there are also many cases of bullying that are not made public," Wyss said. \nThe senator gave an account of a girl who had attempted suicide in eighth grade because of bullying, most of which happened in school.\nThe bill, which was co-authored by Sens. Earline Rogers, Connie Sipes, Rose Ann Antich-Carr and Dennis Kruse, won the approval of the Education Committee by a count of 9 to 2. Under the proposed plan, school safety specialists must be trained by each school specifically in the area of anti-bullying.\n"We want to be able to provide safety specialists in order to teach the teachers what to look for," Wyss said, "and also make children aware of the problem it becomes,"\nPrincipal Gale Hill, however, seems already to have a firm grasp on her school's safety with a systematic procedure for bullying prevention.\n"Monroe County School Corporation has a whole policy on harassment," Hill said, "including verbal, non-verbal and physical cases,"\nShe said that it takes individuals sticking their necks out and owning up to their involvement in particular incidents to realize the problem of bullying and thus curb the problem.\n"The problem sometimes is that no one wants to be a snitch," Hill said. "A child may go home and tell his or her parent, and the parent may call me with a complaint, but by that time it's hard to prove wrongdoing," \n-- Contact Staff Writer Michael Beal \nat mdbeal@indiana.edu.