Elgin School District U46 recently received national notice for expelling or suspending fewer students. Almost every school in the district has some kind of positive-behavior reinforcement program.
But bullying is continuing unabated, three upset parents told the U46 Board of Education this week.
District CEO Tony Sanders, student-discipline chief Randal Ellison and elementary teacher Mary Wojtczak were invited to a conference convened at the White House two weeks ago by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and the U.S. Department of Justice.
Called “Rethinking Discipline,” the theme of the conference was that schools should avoid expelling students, having them arrested or suspending them. Duncan and other speakers said studies have shown that students kicked out of school often get into a “school-to-prison pipeline” by turning their backs on education and turning into chronic criminals.
U46 already has taken that philosophy to heart. Ellison reported recently that the district has slashed its out-of-school suspensions from 7,082 to 1,827 in seven years and has cut the number of expulsions from 16 to one in a year.
But the father of a South Elgin High School graduate told the school board this week that if they had received an award for that change, they should send it back.
Weeping, the father said his son was a 6-foot-2, 280-pound football player who “because of his size and his hearing impairment was a trophy for other students to bully.”
The father said that in 2010 someone urinated on his son during gym class. After football practice the next year, another player smeared human waste on the face of a boy waiting with his son for a ride home. In a third incident, a boy karate-kicked his son in the knee, leaving the leg so unusable his son was taken away from school in an ambulance.
The punishments meted out to the perpetrators in all those cases, the father said, were “slaps on the wrist.” He said the waste-smearer in the second incident was benched for one-fourth of one football game.
“My son liked going to South Elgin his freshman year. By the time he left, he felt like he was in a prison,” the father said. “By not expelling a kid, you may avoid hurting that kid. But you may be allowing him to hurt other kids.”
“When we were kids, bullying was different,” according to a mother who said her daughter, a U46 student, had been bullied. “We could go home and escape it. With social media, bullying is a 24-hour ordeal.”
She said her daughter tried to kill herself twice, once after a bully messaged her that “you should die.”
“The school just called (the offender’s) parent and said, ‘We don’t think your child should come back to school for awhile,'” the mother said.
She charged that in at least two cases, even U46 employees have engaged in bullying, including the well-publicized incident when a substitute teacher at Bartlett High was video-recorded during class mocking a boy’s physical shape with comments and stick-figure drawings. That substitute was fired.
Another mother said her daughter received Facebook messages saying, “Go kill yourself” and “You should die in the oven like other Jews.” She said her daughter started cutting herself on purpose and starving herself. Her grades plummeted. One day the school principal called, saying the mother had to come to the school quickly because her daughter had become hysterical. The girl had to be hospitalized.
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“Inevitably the wrong person is punished” in these situations, the mother said, because the persecuted student finally fights back and gets into trouble for hitting the bully.
After each parent spoke, Sanders asked each to step out of the room and discuss their situations privately with John Heiderscheidt, the U46 official in charge of safety and security. The results of those discussions are confidential. But board members did talk about bullying and discipline in general terms later.
Board member Jeanette Ward asked what could have been done differently to handle those three cases.
“I wouldn’t want it to be the case that we would be reluctant to suspend characters who need to be suspended,” Ward said.
Sanders said the U46 website has added a spot where anyone can report bullying anonymously. He said that rather than kicking students out of school, encouraging them to get into trouble on the outside and cutting their ties to the community, U46 has been imposing more in-school suspensions, “keeping the student in school, just not in the classroom.”
“I would urge the parent community and the community at large, if you are aware of bullying going on, please come forward,” said board member Traci O’Neal Ellis. “And if you come forward and feel you’re not being heard, don’t just sit home and publish it on Facebook. Be persistent, and if that means coming to the board and making your point known, please do so.”
Student board representative Allison Holloway said Larkin High School has a Safe School Advocates Committee — about 40 students who meet weekly to talk about situations they have seen or heard about and pass on those reports to the school administration. She suggested that U46 start something similar on the districtwide level.