U46 takes on bullying with parent presentation & district evaluation

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Updated: January 23, 2012 4:08AM

ELGIN — A 14-year-old New York boy recently took his own life after he was bullied by classmates for his perceived sexuality.

A few days later, an Associated Press/MTV poll found 56 percent of respondents ages 14 to 24 reported that they had experienced abuse through digital media.

But in spite of those headlines, Michael Dorn, a school safety expert from Safe Havens International Inc., said, “There’s not been this dramatic surge of (school) violence in the last few years.”

And the number of suspensions and weapon-related incidents actually is going down in Elgin School District U46, according to John Heiderscheidt, the district’s safety coordinator.

Nearly 100 parents of students in U46 attended Dorn’s presentation, “School Safety Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow; Weakfish — Bullying Through the Eyes of a Child,” last week in the Elgin High School auditorium.

That presentation came as Georgia-based Safe Havens is assessing the safety and security of U46 and its school buildings. October has been named National Bullying Prevention Month.

This school year, Heiderscheidt said, U46 unveiled a new student code of conduct that defines bullying more thoroughly. And it plans to train another 700 staff members on how to recognize and use body language to defuse student situations, in a program from the Milwaukee-based Crisis Prevention Institute. U46 put about 1,000 staff through that training last year.

The use of out-of-school suspensions at U46 middle and high schools was down 9 percent, to 4,650, in 2010-11, the district safety coordinator said. That’s a decrease of 34 percent from the 2007-08 school year.

The number of fights at middle and high schools also is down, from 908 five years ago to 722 last year, he said. And the number of incidents where weapons were reported at those schools dropped from 68 five years ago to 44 last year.

Like body language, buildings also say something about a school, Dorn said. He has sneaked guns through metal detectors and photographed unlocked cabinets containing acid at some schools (not in U46), he said.

“What do our schools say about safety?” he said. “What’s the message that sends to kids? ‘We don’t care.’ And that translates to bullying.”

Dangerous past

Tragedies such as school shootings aren’t new to the United States, Dorn said. The first happened not long after the country’s founding and involved flintlock rifles, he said.

In fact, he said, the most dangerous time to be a public school student was between 1970 and 1980. The rate of school homicides then was three times what it is today, he said.

Safe Havens’ safety and security vulnerability assessment of U46 will evaluate not only the district’s policies and procedures but also its implementation of those procedures, Heiderscheidt said. That includes visiting school buildings in the district to assess things such as lighting and whether doors are locked, as well as quizzing district employees on what they would do in a specific emergency situation.

The evaluation has been made possible by a $456,000 Readiness and Emergency Management for Schools grant the district was awarded in 2009 by the U.S. Department of Education. Its results will be reported at a future U46 Board of Education meeting, according to Heiderscheidt.

After last week’s presentation, parents questioned Dorn and district officials for about an hour. Many said they were unsure whom to contact if their students were bullied. Others said they had hit “dead ends” after contacting their school principals.

Heiderscheidt assured those parents they could contact him or U46 Coordinator of Student Discipline Kelvin Lane to be “another advocate on your team.”