Today in my Research Methods class we had a guest speaker who talked to us about a survey she has been working on, as coincidentally it was about bullying. The survey wanted to see if schools in Ohio has a prevention programs, policies prohibiting bullying, and set form of reporting and investigating. Out of the 614 schools districts, 251 responded. The 37.6% participants were principles, 30.5% were counselors, and 21.1% were teachers. Participants reported that bullying was moderately serious within their district. There was a tendency that principles considered bullying in their district less serious than teachers. This isn't surprising because teachers spend more time with the students than principles. Of these schools 91% said they had a policy prohibiting bullying, 86% had a policy prohibiting bullying on school grounds, 77% had a policy prohibiting bullying on the bus, and 75% had a policy prohibiting bullying at schools sponsored functions. Along with policies prohibiting bullying, 85% of schools had a way for parents and students to report bullying, 82.5% has a way for school personnel to report bullying, and 77.3% had a procedure for investigating bullying. Despite these statistics school personnel felt they had a lack of parental support and were inadequately trained to further prevent bullying.
I found it to be very interesting that though most school had a prevention program and policies prohibiting bullying, school personnel still found bullying to be moderately serious. I remembered our speaker mentioning that of the different strategies there were 42 that schools used that were helpful, including PATHS, steps for respect, and OWLEUS. Schools also reported using 20 strategies that were classified as ineffective including zero tolerance policy, peer facilitated programs and one time efforts. I chose one of the effective strategies and looked into it further. OWLEUS (http://www.violencepreventionworks.org/public/index.page) provides tips for administrators, teachers and parents. With so many programs out there, it surprises me that still one in five students reports being bullied in some way.
These statistics are too high. Its shocking to see where a majority of bullying occurs, but yet when you think about it. those places are where there is little adult supervision, so certain students feel like the have the power over others. There are many prevention programs across the nation, hopefully these ones here can help prevent this, they seem to be a really great idea, hopefully they can prove it.
ReplyDeleteFunny that you mention this because I am in that research methods course as well! I found some of the statistics to be quite fascinating. Even though 91% of the schools reported that they had a prevention program, isn't it interesting to think that bullying is still as common as it is? It is never a bad idea to have prevention programs, but in order to eliminate bullying they need to make sure that they're working. However, I also find it outrageous that there are still 9% of schools without prevention programs. With as serious as bullying has become, every school should be mandated to have anti-bullying programs or preventative methods to try to put an end to the bullying.
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