Oakland’s Piedmont Elementary is a small school with a big problem: Fifth-grade bullies beating up smaller kids.
Anthony Cataldo of Oakland first raised concerns about aggressive bullying at his son’s elementary school last year after Zachary lost four teeth on the playground — but he said he received only a verbal assurance that things would change.
Cataldo said he complained again when some boys at school kicked 7-year-old Zachary in the stomach three months ago but got no response.
Now - two days after an older student slammed Zachary against a tree, fracturing his skull and sending the first-grader to intensive care — Cataldo is hiring a lawyer, and school officials are paying attention.
Apparently, there’s no supervision in the school yard where children wait to be picked up after school. It’s every kid for himself.
Meanwhile, Jay Greene criticizes the New York Times for its failure to report the full story of bullied Billy Wolfe, who went to the Fayetteville, Arkansas school Greene’s children now attend. Before presenting Wolfe as a victim of senseless violence, did the NYT reporter look at school records or the police report?
I was bullied for a long while growing up. Never lost teeth, mostly just verbal crap. And I lashed out at others, too. Not too uncommon. Not in any way an excuse, but a common reaction. I thought the NYTimes story was probably only one side, but didn’t think much of it. I did wonder why a national paper based in New York couldn’t go from a story like that towards examining the issue nationwide, but I guess that kid was too great a story.
Kids are jerks: they look for ways to get others angry, crying, scared, or whatever. They bug people, poke people, call them names, are elitists in their own worlds. (They’re like some blogs.) When I look back at much of my childhood, it’s with a mix of misery and shame.
Jon, I’m sorry you had to live like that. I’m very thankful that my parents could afford (with many sacrifices) to send me to private school after I was held to the wall at knife-point in 7th grade.
Now that I’m grown up (different town), our elementary school is very good at keeping bullies in line. After 5th grade, the kids are dumped together and teachers are given no authority, and bullies are totally in control of the building. Even bringing a weapon to school (the ultimate sin) will just get a kid switched to a school on a different side of town.
I homeschool my kids beginning in 6th grade now.
Lori:
I wonder if you are mixing in some classism with your definition of bullying. Certainly being held at knifepoint is violent behavior (I would call it assault, actully, not bullying), but to think that private schools are free from bullying reflects a complete misunderstanding of the dynamics of harassment and exclusion.
I see it again in your assertion that “after 5th grade the kids are dumped together.” Are you saying that prior to 5th grade they are separated into bullies and non-bullies? I am not certain what “authority” teachers should be “given” in order to take on bullying behavior. The best work in combating bullying behavior is in prevention, which involves teacher collaboration to set an expectation of the values of inclusion (something that I am not certain that you have really bought into) of all students, provision of adequate supervision in the areas in which bullying/harassing are most likely to occur (hallways, buses, lunchrooms, playground), and responding when bullying behavior is observed or reported. As a parent walking through the hallways when visiting a school, no one gives me the “authority” to do anything. But I can guarantee that it wouldn’t stop me from saying something if I observed students making fun of, poking, shoving, pushing, namecalling, etc. another student.
It seems that what you want is for someone to identify the “bad kids” and make them go away–or punish them into submission. It doesn’t work that way.
After reading the articles about this case I am still left with a question: Where are the ADULTS who are supposed to be in charge?
If Billy is both victim and offender, where are the adults who should notice the hitting, the stealing, the verbal abuse?
Why is first grader repeatly attacked at school? Why is there no protection for little kids?
Margo, I’m sorry to mislead you and waste so much of your time. I’m afraid you read entirely too much into my short post. I assure you that while I am finding out every day how little I actually know, I am not quite the prejudiced simpleton I’ve lead you to believe.
My comment was intended as just a short anecdote of what I thought was extreme bullying, and how my family responded. I didn’t in any way mean it to reflect The Answer to Bullying or my entire understanding of what constitutes bullying.
I’m also sorry if I implied that there is no bullying at private schools. In the small private school I attended it was much better than where I’d come from.
By kids being “dumped together”, I meant that many GRADES were together in the halls (6th-8th) every hour and not as in the elementary schools here, where most students spend the day with only the 23 other children in their classroom, and always supervised by a teacher. The teachers in the middle school, from what I can tell, have entirely given up on trying to keep the middle school children from acting as bullies and thugs, because the administration does not support them (ie, “no authority”).
I don’t see where I implied “classism” at all. Everyone in my public school was white and middle class — The boy who held a knife to my throat included. The private school where I ended up was actually more diverse as far as “class” goes (some kids were on scholarship because they were poor, some kids were from wealthy families) and also ethnicity.
Since my family’s answer to my bullying problem was for ME to leave the school, how would that make you believe that I want the opposite — for “bad kids” to go away or be punished? I never sought punishment for my bully, I just didn’t want it to happen again.
From the linked article about the elementary school: “We don’t have the finances to cover parents before the hours that school starts,” Saddler said. “And after school, we do not have supervision for students who are not enrolled in after-school programs. We are very, very clear with parents that they need to make arrangements for their children.”
If you are told by your school that there will be no after school supervision for students not enrolled in the after school program, and you elect not to enroll your student AND your after school care giver doesn’t arrive before school gets out to pick up your child, why is it the school is remiss for not supervising your kid?
Anything that happens during the school day, the school should actively be supervising and minimizing risk to kids. But before and after school, the responsibility is on the parents, particularly when the school makes clear there is no supervision of students.
Lori- No need to apologize. Everytime someone wants their kids well educated and safe by puttting them in private schools, the charge of elitism surfaces. I’m not willing to force my child to endure poor quality instruction and lack of discipline in our local public schools. I’m not blaming the teachers per se, I blame the parents who don’t care. Some public schools are excellent, some horrible - let us chose without feeling guilty.
NDC,
If the school assures a parent that they will handle a problem or prevent further incidents, that’s a commitment. But why the children in question weren’t charged with assault (as they should have been) is a huge oversight. I’d start charging these brats to the fullest extent of the law.
Having had children of my own, and after placing them in public, private, charter, and home-school settings, I have come to the conclusion that children’s social dynamics will always include willful children, those they seek to control, and children who ignore that and are grateful not to be noticed by the willful ones. Some of this is harmful, some gets toward bullying-level behavior, and much of it is benign. Girls do it, boys do it, rich and poor and popular and unpopular do it. Most outgrow that behavior, but there are too many who never get called on it. Strong wills are desirable, but must be guided.
That’s why I hate societies of children. Children should be with adults as much as possible, since they’re the group we want them to emulate, they’re the group we want them to act like, and they’re the group best able to control themselves when opportunities to belittle others come up. Any environment run by children will devolve into tyrants, sycophants, and the underclass. And that’s enough sociology for now.
“Certainly being held at knifepoint is violent behavior (I would call it assault, actully, not bullying)…”
I would call it “aggravated assault with a deadly weapon,” a felony in every jurisdiction that I’m aware of.
One might also ask where the police were during all this. Completely unaware of the situation because no one called them? They don’t need to be called to go after victimless crimes. They just lack the time, funds and ingenuity to protect children.
Lori:
I think that you are responding to some of the problems that you have posed. It doesn’t take a great grant of authority for teachers to decide that everyone from grade 6-8 shouldn’t be dumped into the hall way together. I frankly cannot imagine any principal turning down a proposal to change this situation. I have worked in middle schools where they they did it through scheduling and location of classes. Rather than ring a bell to start the chaos, at the appropriate time the English class changed places with the Math class across the hall. Then they changed with the group doing science and social studies next door. This was 6th grade and they were all located in the same hall way. The 7th and 8th grade had a bit more freedom–but they were in another part of the building.
The barriers that I have seen–in my son’s middle school for instance, where chaos reigned. I talked to several teachers. One, who initiated the discussion by saying how much he hated transitions, said that he had worked in schools where teachers were required to be in the hallway between classes. Another teacher asked me “what do we do about the teachers who don’t want to change?” There are in fact teachers (and union reps) who flat out state that all “discipline” should be handled by administrators. What they want is to teach only those children who do right. Anyone else they should send to the office so that they can be fixed and returned, or sent away. So, I am skeptical of any pronouncements of lack of authority, because the real solutions require very little “authority,” much more willingness to be involved.
It’s likely that the admin knows that bullies’ parents are almost certainly buttheads. Better let the bullying go on than face the buttheads and their lawyers.
Victims’ parents are less likely to make a fuss.