The Unionville-Chadds Ford School District now has an updated bullying policy aimed at empowering students to report incidents and to get school personnel and parents more involved in prevention and resolution.

“The statement this policy makes is that this school district and our school board will not tolerate bullying, or harassment, by anyone against anyone,” said School Board Director Kathy Do.

School Board members passed the amended policy during their Aug. 19 meeting. The change adds new guidelines to the existing policy making it easier for people to report bullying incidents.

“It creates a reporting form so that if someone is being bullied or if someone witnesses a bullying incident, they’re able to report it. They can do it anonymously, or not, but every report is looked at and every report is taken very seriously. Every report is investigated.”

Even before the policy addition, reporting of incidents increased and Do said that’s a good thing.

“That is showing that people are feeling empowered to stand up against bullying,” she said.

For Do, the key factor is getting everyone involved. She likened dealing with bullying to building a three-legged stool, with the first leg being students, the second leg being adults within the school system and the third being parents.

Students need to know what it is when they see it, as either a victim or witness, and even when they are the culprits, she said.

“They have to know what bullying behavior is and we have to work with students to teach them, in the end, to make bullying socially unacceptable. Also to teach kids resilience, to be able to stand up for themselves, to not feel bad about themselves because they’re being picked on, that they’re still a good person despite what somebody is saying to them or about them.”

The second leg concerns adults in the school setting.

“Teachers, bus drivers, cafeteria workers…They’re equally important because students need to feel they’re supported,” Do said, “But bullying also exists beyond student on student. We see all the time that there are incidents where bullying involves adults, either as victims or perpetrators.”

Do cited several national cases such as the abusive Rutgers basketball coach and a New York state case where students picked on an elderly woman bus monitor.

U-CF and the Kennett Consolidated School District developed an anti-bullying coalition and have held joint discussions on how bullying, in all it’s various aspects, impacts people. Do said at one meeting, students began opening up when the subject of adult bullying arose.

According to Do, sometimes a teacher starts teasing a student, but the teacher doesn’t realize that the student’s self-confidence is being undermined.

“They talked about incidents where it would happen over and over again so that it became a standing joke for an entire year...It could be a derogatory nickname or simply seeing that kid as being different or slow and teases the kid…When a teacher teases, or treats a student inappropriately, it often gives license to other students to pick on or harass that student.”

In that situation, she said, the student-bullies felt as if their behavior was condoned by the teacher.

The third leg of the stool, she said, involves parents.

“If these messages are not being reinforced at home, if we do not have the support of the parents, we can’t take it all the way. We can’t really address the bullying problem effectively unless the parents are on board.”

Do received some initial pushback from parents in the district who, she said, told her there is no problem with bullying in the district. However, Do said the district was not immune to occurrences and that Unionville-Chadds Ford was no better or worse than other districts.

“Every school district is going to have a bullying problem and we can’t keep our heads in the sand,” she said.

While getting all three entities involved is important, another key element of the policy is the development of various programs designed to teach students resiliency, how to respond to situations for their own emotional well-being.

As School Superintendent John Sanville said, “There’s a difference between resiliency and being able to ‘take it.’” It’s a significant feature in a national anti-bullying program.

“Resiliency is a key component in the Olweus bullying policy,” Sanville said. “Resiliency has to do with students being able to stand up for themselves in an appropriate manner and, also, to survive and to thrive when bad things happen.”

One reason for the significance of resiliency is that it goes beyond just bullying situations. It goes to taking responsibility and making the right choices after something negative happens.

“It’s really part of life,” Sanville said. “Bad things happen in life. You face challenges. How well do you respond? How well do you come out on the other side?”

In that respect, being resilient is a matter of attitude and ability to learn from experiences, he added.

The district is planning a number of programs to address bullying and resiliency. Sanville said the programs are still being developed and will be tailored to meet the needs within the individual schools based on experiences there.