Recently, Team Rainbow Rabbit has been posting stories involving young children and high school kids being bullied at school.
Last week, there was an online petition started by parents unsatisfied that nothing was being done to stop the bullying taking place at a Florida school. The impact bullying has on a child’s education has also been a recent topic of discussion.
Much of this comes back to the simple fact that anti-bullying programs are not being taught to students at a young age, and teachers are not adapt to handling these situations the best way they can.
This could apply to the Los Angeles school district, where a recent survey proved that bullying was heavily prevalent among grade school and high school students in 2016.
Add fighting bullying to the long list of priorities for which the nation’s second-largest school system has good intentions but sluggish follow-through.
One in 5 Los Angeles high school students and 1 in 4 elementary students said they had been bullied last school year, according to a survey conducted as part of a newly released internal audit.
As for efforts to curb bullying, at one campus, the person in charge of handling bullying complaints was “not aware that she was appointed for this role,” the report says.
And although schools were supposed to keep bullying complaint logs, at nearly every campus the audit examined they were either not in use or were not up to date.
Although the extent of bullying found by the L.A. Unified’s Office of Inspector General is not necessarily out of line with national figures, the audit suggests that students are getting less help than they should.
“Most teachers and staff did not receive high quality training on bullying prevention on an annual basis,” the report says. Schools try to address bullying but fall short, to varying degrees.
In addition, the district, according to the audit, has fewer staff members overseeing anti-bullying efforts than other school systems with similar goals.
Part of the problem is a lack of clarity about what to do. Some of the report consists of auditors and administrators disputing or trying to agree on the best approaches. The district conceded the need for better training.
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