Photo from Flickr under Creative Commons license

Photo from Flickr under Artistic Commons license

Responding to concerns that schools should do more to terminate bullying, a new state audit found that virtually schools do not track whether their anti-bullying programs accept fabricated campuses any safer and that schools are inconsistent in how they record and resolve bullying incidents.

Oversight and guidance from the California Department of Education has been insufficient, the inspect said, noting the section went four years without noticing that it was non monitoring schools to ensure they were addressing student complaints, as required by constabulary. At the aforementioned time, funding has been cutting for statewide surveys on pupil prophylactic, making it more difficult to make up one's mind students' experiences with bullying.

On the plus side, the audit, released Tuesday by State Accountant Elaine Howle, did observe that the vast majority of California schools have anti-bullying programs in place and have provided staff grooming in how to prevent bullying, discrimination, harassment and intimidation.

Withal, one advocate said the audit confirms that much remains to be done to reduce the high levels of bullying in California schools.

"The inspect shows that passing laws isn't enough – we need to implement them and ensure accountability at the district, county and statewide levels," said Jesse Melgar, spokesman for Equality California, a San Francisco-based advancement group. "Now, California schools and the Section of Didactics have an opportunity to use the audit's findings to review, update and enhance their policies to amend protect our youth and ensure student success."

The California Department of Education disputed many of the audit's finding, maxim officials are committed to addressing bullying and keeping students safety.

"Although not mentioned in this study, California has made pregnant progress in addressing negative schoolhouse behavior despite the impacts of ongoing budget cuts and staff reductions," Chief Deputy Superintendent of Public Pedagogy Richard Zeiger said in an emailed statement. "Withal, CDE acknowledges the accountant's concerns and volition continue our piece of work to build and reinforce a positive school climate throughout the country. Our aim is to take both a meridian-down and lesser-upwards approach to the issue – engaging students to focus their time, attention, and energy on learning, while working with school districts to implement bullying prevention strategies at the state and local level."

Bullying at school

Some 28 percentage of seventh graders in California reported being harassed at school, and 22 percent of 9th-grade students reported that other students had spread rumors or lies nearly them online at least once over the previous 12-month flow, according to a 2009-11 California Healthy Kids Survey, the largest statewide survey of student well being, cited in the audit. The report noted the link between bullying and several loftier-contour educatee suicides, including the 2010 suicide of Tehachapi xiii-yr-old Seth Walsh, a victim of anti-gay bullying.

"He was just i of many young people who decided it was easier to commit suicide than to get to schoolhouse the next day," said Karyl Ketchum, assistant professor of women and gender studies at California Land University, Fullerton, and co-chair of the School Compliance Job Force of the Orange County Equality Coalition, which monitors schools in Orange Canton for compliance with anti-bullying and bigotry laws.

"The local educational agencies are non following through with their requirements under the police and no i cares," she said.

bullies-stock

Schools can better evaluate the effectiveness of anti-bullying programs, a new state inspect said. Photograph from Stock Images

Auditors surveyed every school district, county function of educational activity and charter schoolhouse in the state – nearly two,000 in total – and received responses from 1,394, with 80 per centum saying they had adopted anti-bullying programs and policies. Some 55 percent said they did not formally evaluate the effectiveness of the programs.

While the country does non crave staff grooming in preventing bullying, bigotry, harassment and intimidation, almost of those surveyed provided such training.

In addition to the statewide survey, the auditors visited six schools in Los Angeles, Fresno and Sacramento, and those site visits raised concerns about whether schools were receiving sufficient guidance on how to document and resolve complaints. At the schools, auditors found that staff did not e'er document complaints, follow reporting requirements or record follow-ups on incidents.

Experts said that collecting accurate data was essential to ending what President Barack Obama called "the pain, agony, and loss caused by bullying in our schools and communities."

"Almost schools in the U.Due south. have no systematic ways of tracking reports, and in most situations, exercise not fifty-fifty follow their own policies or guidelines," said Dorothy Espelage, co-chair of an American Educational Research Association chore force on bullying that issued a 2022 report on the prevention of bullying in schools. "Every bit bullying legislation is oftentimes 'unfunded' mandates, there are no research monies to even track compliance of school districts."

State department criticized

The inspect was critical of the Department of Education, starting time with the department's failure to observe that its Part of Equal Opportunity was not collecting data from 2008-09 through 2011-12 through its federal monitoring program to ensure that school districts had fix bullying reporting procedures and anti-bullying practices. The department's internal program to collect data was not updated to gather the bullying data until 2012, 4 school years after the state Safe Place to Learn Act mandated that the department provide oversight, the written report noted. The explanations for the filibuster included receiving instructions not to update because of a lawsuit, the conventionalities that a old superintendent had suspended the educational equity reviews, that staff were unavailable or assigned to other higher-priority tasks, and that an employee assigned to make the updates failed to do then, the report found.

The department was besides chastised for failing to meet the threescore-day legal requirement to resolve appeals in some cases, with 11 of the eighteen appeals reviewed by the auditors running between ane and 305 days belatedly.

Source: "Prevention of Bullying in Schools, Colleges, and Universities: Research Report and Recommendations," from the American Educational Research Association.

Source: "Prevention of Bullying in Schools, Colleges, and Universities" from the American Educational Research Association.

The department neglected its leadership role, the written report said, by failing to apply its trove of data nerveless from the California Healthy Kids Survey, which asks children in four grade levels questions well-nigh school rubber and connectedness, to guide improvements in practices and policy. "By failing to perform whatever analysis of the Kids Survey results, educational activity is missing an opportunity to evaluate trends in students' views on school climate, which could better inform both it and the Legislature on boosted steps that could exist taken to improve schoolhouse safety in California," the written report stated. Because of a federal budget cut, California schools are no longer required to administrate the survey every two years to be in compliance with the federal Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act.

Also criticized was the section'southward website of bullying resources for schools, with auditors determining that the site was cluttered with 10-year-quondam inquiry, a dead link, and little data on electric current issues such as online bullying or bullying related to existence perceived as gay or lesbian. In its survey, the audit constitute that more than one-half of the schoolhouse districts, charter schools and county offices of educational activity were unaware that the department even had resource to assist them in complying with laws to protect students from harassment and discrimination.

Zeiger, the state official, disputed that audit's contention that the department was non a leader in protecting students.

"Protecting student safety and guarding against discrimination are top priorities at the California Section of Pedagogy," he said, "and the department has been a leader in the prevention of bullying and assisting schools, parents and students in safety issues."

Complaint procedure faulted

The audit noted that schools are encouraged to use their own staff to resolve bullying complaints quickly, but that resolving complaints internally could lead to conflicts of involvement. The audit cited 2 incidents in Sacramento City Unified School District where the administrator who was assigned to resolve a complaint of bullying, harassment, intimidation or discrimination was the aforementioned person named in the complaint for allegedly declining to have appropriate action to address the pupil incident. The audit did not provide details about the specific complaints.

Sacramento Metropolis volition have immediate activeness to strengthen its anti-bullying efforts, said district spokesman Gabe Ross. He added that the district was the first in the surface area to implement a comprehensive anti-bullying policy and now has a total-fourth dimension, grant-funded anti-bullying specialist at the commune level.

"Our schools are certainly safer for kids than they were before we began this piece of work ii years ago," Ross said.

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