Glen Cove schools link safety, bullying

Posted

Over the past year, mass shootings have dominated discourse around the country — particularly the tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., in February that left 17 students and faculty dead. For much of the 2017-18 school year, discussions at Glen Cove’s Board of Education meetings focused on keeping district students safe. As the new school year begins, somenew intiatives are being implemented.

At a school board meeting on Sept. 12, Superintendent Dr. Maria Rianna said that the materials for a “man trapper” vestibule at Glen Cove High School, designed to prevent intruders from entering the building, were en route to the district.

A bond committee, formed in the spring of 2017, will present its findings at the next board meeting, scheduled for Sept. 26. The committee has conducted walkthroughs of all of the district’s facilities, accompanied by district architects and engineers, to discuss capital im-provements, in-cluding some that would improve the buildings’ security.

The high school has also signed on to Rachel’s Challenge, a nationwide anti-bullying program started by Darrell and Sandy Scott, the parents of the first student killed in the 1999 Columbine High School shooting. Glen Cove has its own chapter of the Friends of Rachel club, which — following a schoolwide assembly about bullying and school violence — trains student participants to promote a culture of compassion to minimize the psychological factors that lead to school shootings.

Rianna said that high school students who were saddened by the Parkland shootings had urged the school to create the club, and that Principal Antonio Santana had implemented the program. “We want our students to be compassionate young people,” Rianna said, “and understand that small acts of kindness go a long way.”

An anti-bullying clearinghouse

On Sept. 12, Nassau County unveiled a new website, NassauStopBullying.org, aimed at aggregating anti-bullying information for parents, which County Legislator Josh Lafazan, the driving force behind the site, said would help bring parents’ understanding of bullying into the 21st century.

“Bullying has changed drastically since the days of our parents,” Lafazan said. “It used to end at 3 p.m. at the schoolhouse doors. With the advent of social media, bullying is now a 24/7 vicious nightmare for these kids.”

In addition to educational resources for parents, the site features Chonkey the Donkey, a character created by cartoonist Michael Kellison. Kellison, 43, was bullied as a child, and has said he hopes Chonkey will help teach kids to be kind to one another.

The Dignity for All Students Act is a state law that was enacted in 2012. It requires schools to include anti-bullying measures in their codes of conduct, and to gather data on bullying incidents. The county’s new website lists each school’s DASA coordinator, a faculty member who ensures that the law is implemented at the school level. Lafazan said that the list was created in response to reports from parents around the county that they didn’t know who their schools’ DASA coordinators were.

Rianna said that a school’s DASA coordinator is usually the principal or an assistant principal, and that the district has several ways to report bullying incidents, including emailing any faculty member. She stressed that all faculty, including maintenance staff, lunch monitors and parent volunteers, are trained to handle bullying and harassment complaints.

According to DASA-mandated incident reporting data made available by the State Education Department, Glen Cove schools reported 11 incidents of bullying in 2017, compared with a county average of 16 incidents per district and a statewide average of 42.

A state Department of Education spokeswoman said that the department was exploring ways to make DASA reporting requirements more practical. A Safe Schools Task Force Workgroup on Data Use and Reporting had, prior to the 2017-18 school year, amended some definitions of the requirements “to make reporting less complicated and to [emphasize] accurately identifying violent incidents to facilitate accurate reporting.”