School has new plan to tackle bullies

Oak View Middle School in Andover, is, by most accounts, not a threatening place. Fights don't break out all the time. Weaker kids don't get routinely pummeled. Gangs of intimidating eighth-graders don't cruise the hallways looking for sixth- and seventh-graders to push around.

The bullying is more subtle. It might be a putdown. It could be consciously excluding someone from a group. Enough of that more subtle bullying goes on at Oak View for the staff there to jump at the chance to pilot an anti-bullying program called Olweus.

The program was devised by a Swedish psychologist, and involves the participation in the United States of the Hazelden drug and alcohol treatment program and researchers at Clemson University in South Carolina. Money for the program comes from federal Safe and Drug-Free Schools funding. Olweus is geared toward schoolwide programs that aim to identify bullying behavior for students and school staff, and stop it.

"If it's implemented with fidelity, it should show a 30 to 70 percent reduction in student reports of being bullied and bullying others," said Karen Dahl, the Anoka-Hennepin School District prevention specialist who is overseeing the Olweus program at Oak View, which is the only school in the district with the program.

There's an annual survey that goes with the program. Last spring, 1,040 of Oak View's 1,250 students participated in the first Olweus bullying survey. According to English teacher Julie Goldsmith, who co-chairs the school's Olweus Bullying Prevention Committee, the vast majority of kids who responded had not only witnessed bullying, but wished they could have done something to stop it.

"One of the interesting things that backed our desire to get this thing going is the statistic where there were kids who saw things happen and wanted to do something about it, but they didn't know what to do," Goldsmith said. "It was a huge chunk of kids, about 90 percent. ... Only about three percent actually did something. So, we needed to give them the tools to go out and help other people." Oak View Principal Jinger Gustafson said the survey responses indicated that bullying was occurring to a far greater degree than what was being reported. It also indicated that bullying behavior was occurring in such locations as the locker bays near bathrooms, the lunchrooms and other common areas.

An initial response was to assign more staff members to patrol those areas. Also, the entire school staff went through Olweus training before the start the 2007-08 school year.

The students have Olweus training, which sometimes involves them playing the parts of the victim, bully and onlookers, once a week during their homeroom periods. Part of the training involves helping the school community to distinguish between bullying and normal middle-school hijinks.

"If you're just roughhousing with a buddy where you're equal, we understand that's just kids being kids," Goldsmith said. "Bullying is where there is a power imbalance, someone doing something to intentionally belittle or make another person feel badly."

Repeated negative actions aimed at a defenseless person is a hallmark of bullying, she added.

Gustafson said, lately, the office has been getting more reports of bullying, a possible sign not so much of more incidents, but of heightened awareness.

For years, the Anoka-Hennepin School District has been active in spreading the don't-be-a-bully message throughout its schools. Whether this latest effort to stop bullying will work remains for future surveys and discipline reports to tell.

"It will be interesting to see what happens with the numbers," Goldsmith said. "It could be that instances of bullying have been reduced. It could also be that students could have a new awareness of what bullying is."

Norman Draper • 612-673-4547