Interesting Proposal to Solve the Bullying Problem

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I've been hearing a lot of things about aspies being doubly punished: being victimized by the bullies, and getting in trouble for fighting back. I have the following proposal on how to end it.

Problem:
School officials have a weird habit of combining the belief of "boys will be boys" and "it's wrong to hit someone". As a result, the bullies are "boys will be boys", and we're the "it's wrong to hit someone". This happens because bullies tend to be athletes, who bring more money to the school than we do, the smart people.

Solution:
Separate the monitoring of behavior from the school. Instead of having school officials monitor what you do, there should be a centralized academic security office (ASO) in every city. It will have specially trained officers monitoring each and every school. The schools will have cameras in every room where students can potentially go. All cameras will be wired to a designated security room for that school in the ASO.

Technical details:
Cameras will be placed in plain view inside all rooms where students are found. Each camera will have a number, prominently posted, and having a logical system based on the layout of the school. Depending on the room, there will be a different number of cameras per square footage. For instance, the gym and the cafeteria will require the highest density of cameras, while the guidance office will require the least. Hallways, classrooms, restrooms, and the courtyard will have cameras as well. (Due to privacy concerns, the restrooms will have cameras only near the sinks.) All cameras will have the capability to tilt, pan, zoom, and turn, in order to capture any bullying incident. Each camera will have its own IP address, and will be connected via broadband to a designated monitor in the ASO. Information from school cameras will be continuously streamed through the ASO's hard drives, so that any incident can be recorded if an officer feels it needs to be.

Human details:
ASO officers will be watching the monitors, and writing down any suspicious activity they notice. Each officer will be assigned one monitor and only that monitor. Not being with the school, they are far more likely to take down the true information, not the one that brings the most money to the school. When an officer notices a conflict, the ASO will call the school, give them the information they recorded, and a school official can intervene with all the right information: for instance, the bully really did hit first, and the aspie simply struck him in self-defense. If a recording is needed, the ASO can send a digitally recorded CD to the school for proof, should the police get involved.
At the beginning of every grading period, letters will be sent home, explaining to parents about the existance of the system, and how it works. It will be made VERY CLEAR that cameras are there only to deter bullying, not to enforce school rules.

Human/system interaction:
Students can request extra monitoring in a specific area of the school, using the ASO's website. For example, if a theatre student is being hassled outside the auditorium every day, he can log in to the ASO website, type in the name of the school and the camera number of where the bullying takes place, and click "Request Extra Monitoring".
School officials will not have any online interaction. Their only contact with the ASO officers will be by phone (traditional or VoIP). All schools will be issued a special 800 number. This is done to prevent the bias in the information being transmitted. Furthermore, the officers are sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
ASO officers will have a designated monitor, so that they can become really familiar with what happens in "their" area of the school.

Responsibilites:
The school will be responsibile for maintaining the cameras in the school. Students will be able to report to the ASO, if the school is neglecting the cameras.
The ASO will be responsible for maintaining anything inside their building.
Phone and broadband lines will be the duty of respective telecom companies.
Anyone caught tampering with any part of the system (except for repairs), or falsifying any information will be sent to jail for 1 month.
Annual funds will be provided by the city and the state, under the name "Academic Security Fund"

Result:
Aspies will be able to walk thorugh the school building in complete safety. They will be monitored by officers with special training, rather than corrupt school officials. Although nothing in the NT world is guaranteed, it will greatly reduce bullying because the cameras will be a deterrent.

Future possibilites:
Partnerships can be formed with school bus companies. Cameras can be installed on buses, and broadcast the information to cell phone towers, through the phone grid, and to the ASO. The functionality will be the same. It will also let drivers to focus more on driving and less on the bullying.

Potential issues/limitations:
The cameras do not have the capability of recording verbal bullying.
Some aspies (and non-bullying NTs as well) might be intimidated by the camaras.

Last edited by Aspie1 on 21 Feb 2006, 1:30 am, edited 9 times in total.

I do not agree with this idea at all. Students should be monitored for interacting inappropriately in any hall, and I am absolutely, positively in total shock when things like that go unnoticed. Sure, I hear vulgar words in my hallway, but who is anyone to try to defend themselves and state their case in front of me? They are very lucky that they realize I am a student.

There are some schools and school buses which already have cameras. I can think of an incident which has been shown on national news programs in which a young girl was attacked on a school bus, the camera was rolling, and the students knew it, yet they did it anyway.

Cameras may not prevent the crime, but might make it easier to prosecute those who commit it. Of course if nothing happens to those who are caught on tape, things will go on business as usual.

Another problems with your proposal. For some strange reason (or maybe not strange at all), those how are bullies tend to go for jobs such as police and security officers. Plus, they tend to have the belief that athletes should be handled with kid gloves while who cares about the smart person.

A simpler proposal (although I know it will never happen) is to remove sports from the educational program and make sports teams the domain of the community.

I got beat up real bad in grades 4-8, and remember the times I got in trouble for being the victim, and not even fighting back--but rather, after my assailant made up a story that I attempted to fight back...before the teacher arrived on the scene. This teacher, like the one who told me I should start physically defending myself from bullies (read: get suspended for fighting), was later made a principal in the school district I grew up in.

Your plan is based on good principles, but I doubt it would be able to be implemented. School districts are, simply put, usually broke. Additionally, many of the municipalities which these school districts are in are also broke. They don't have the money to install not only what would be millions of dollars districtwide for many of the larger school districts, but also to pay their share of the operating costs of such a system (camera maintenence, people watching the monitors, especially if it's one person to a monitor, etc.). It's a good idea to keep so many eyes and ears on our school system that students can't get away with horrible things, but I don't think this would work.

What I do think would work, however, is an agressive program to end the practice of bullying victims becoming scapegoats of the school district. It sounds like your proposed program's major goal was this. We need our educators to be re-trained, and school policies revisited, so that when bullying occurs, or, when a behavioral incident involving a student (ESPECIALLY those who are not known for their social dominence) occurs, the victim isn't victimized. Schools need to make sure that they don't tell victims "it's okay to beat up that bully"--but they must do so through actually punishing the bully. There may be cheaper, more traditional ways to do this, including workshops for teachers that specifically demonstrate the types of bullying they aren't addressing correctly today, and what to do about it. Setting up systems in schools that will allow victims who are also being punished to get the record set straight in the end.

We also need better laws and school policies against general harassment. We have them against sexual harassment, but we don't have them against harassement in general. We need the perpetrators to be given more than a slap on the wrist once a pattern of bullying has been identified. We need harassing statements to be handled with through disciplinary action (I'll never forget receiving an email in 8th grade--on my SCHOOL EMAIL ACCOUNT--from another student that read "im gonna wop your a[expletive deleted] after class"...he couldn't spell, I told the teacher, and as usual, no discipline was taken against him). Especially, we need a law that will make teachers legally liable and held responsible for every time they "got sick and tired of sticking up for a kid that kept getting bullied," or "got sick and tired of always having to stop people from bullying a student." Bullying is bullying, and each incident should be responded to with appropriate disciplinary action whether it happens to a student once in their entire educational careers, or once every fifteen minutes.

There is some truth to that. Some people take those jobs because it gives them some kind of power trip. They like the power a gun and a badge give. The same I think is true with some people in the military. I think there are also, believe it or not, teachers who fit that profile. Some of them like the idea of holding a child's future in their hands and being able to destroy it with just a little red ink.

I think schools should just stick to education and not all of this other stuff they are involved in. The idea of either getting rid of sports are at least reshaping school culture so student athletes aren't put on a pedastal would make a difference.

I can remember in school everyone being mandated to attend a pep rally every Friday before a football game where we all had to cheer for the athletes. I also remember seeing decorations all over the school glorifying the latest victory on the sports field and being reminded of how I had no "school spirit" because I didn't care if the team won or lost.

In some communities, high school football even has its own TV or radio program. The athletes get huge spreads in the local paper if they win and sometimes if they don't. If a school wins an academic competition, that victory gets a few lines in the back of the paper if at all. When you think of what a school is supposed to be about, that is totally upside down.

I once attended a private school that didn't glorify its athletes but instead, put limited resources into the classroom. There was bullying, teasing, etc., but not as much as at other schools I went to.

Yeah, I could never quite understand having to do this, either.

And I still have no school spirit. It really bothers me how athletics is so glorified in schools these days and academics is not. Or that is how it seems. Creativity outside of the classroom is even less recognized. Just goes to show you what the world is coming to.

I never got any school spirit. In fact, I never quite understood what it was. As for it being "these days," it has been that way for a long time. I'm 37 years old and when I was in school, it was like this as well. If you weren't in any "school activities", you didn't count, regardless of the other things you did.

I used to think as a kid these schools were more interested in control and preserving status quo than education. I still believe that even now.

It isn't just public schools, my experiences were from private schools. I can think of one that even though it had a well funded athletics program, some of the classrooms had shortages of text books and many of the textbooks they had were several years old, purchased used from other schools.

I also went to an all boys school that was facing enrollment declines and budget problems, in spite of providing a good college prep academics program. They did what I consider the right thing, cut funding to athletics and other extracurricular activities, and kept as much as they could in the classrooms. That school ended up shutting down in the early 1990s, while the other school I mentioned, that didn't have books but a top notch football team, is still in operation now.

Signs that it hasn't gotten better and probably won't.

School blows, but I don't think the solution is the Thought Police, heh.

See, the problem for me was that I took it seriously. I took every success and failure there as some indication of myself. Eventually, it got so bad that I couldn't stand to be there for more than ten minutes and I would just totally melt down, sometimes cry, in the middle of class every day.

And it's not always just some particular one person who makes it bad for a student, some bad ass bully. That's happened to me though -- every year in high school, there has been at least one person who threatens me. But largely, it's not so much what people do, but what people don't do. Every time I tried to make conversation with people and was laughed at. Every time I sat alone at lunch, watching people talk to each other and having a good time. Every time I was rejected from some group or activity at school. It all builds up.

So I did mostly all independent study last year, just took a driver's ed class one part of the year, and a spanish one the other part of the year. But I spent a lot of time at Dartmouth (I took a comp sci class there, it was awesome), and at CRREL, and I met some great people who were really smart and devoted to what they did. I was amazed taking a class at Dartmouth that the kids actually listened and took notes and stuff! And it eventually hit me: high school is pretty screwed up. It's crazy world, upside down town. Backwards land! See, birds swim in the sea, toilets flush clockwise, morons are respected, and opportunities are extremely limited.

It's all crap. They want to keep you in this box: ooh? am I popular enough? let's go to the prom! All this stereotypical stuff, and even academically they act to segment people up. It's not like they're evil or something, it's just that it makes their job a hell of a lot easier if every kid acts the same and has a small range of options. I was basically told I would be lucky to get a GED and go to a community college or something, and I believed it! Screw that! It turns out I'm way better.So I had to realize I needed to set my own goals, follow my passions, and work hard at school, and BS my way around the screwed up system they have to get some place better.

I mean, before I used to think I was some kind of freak because people wouldn't talk to me and stuff and I can't get a girlfriend. But now I realize it's totally arbitrary stuff. Maybe I nod my head the wrong way, maybe I've one too many zits, maybe I laugh at the wrong jokes. Who freakin' cares?

A year ago, I didn't even have hope, but now I have that, and that's more than I could have ever hoped for. College is going to be a hell of a lot better than high school merely by virtue of not being high school, and even if not, I can deal.

So, in summary, it's not so much school that's horrible and stuff, it's dealing with it, I think. At least I hope; I'm going back full time for my senior year, and I hope I can stand it. Wish me luck.

OK Malcolm, that may be a little over the top. Can you tone it down a little please.

I understand you hate bullies but I think this thread was made to discuss constructive ways to deal with them.

Oh.

I stoped taking school seriously back in 8th grade. Nothing good came out of the second half of my public school education. Enduring daily onslaughts of verbal and physical harrasment, as well as being shunned in general takes a lot out of a person. Looking back on junior high and high school, it was nothing more than one giant social gathering where hundreds of kids got together during the day for gathering into their social groups, gabbing, and about half of them going outside at lunch to smoke, all interspersed with something called "education" in between. The only difference between high school and junior high was in junior high, at least one kid in each class was hell bent on causing as much disruption as possible.

I was a tough one, I was incredible thick skinned, and that helped me get through it all.

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Last edited by Ante on 09 Nov 2005, 7:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.

That sounds like a good idea, but there's problem. The American legal system will block it. According to them, public humiliation hurts kids' self-esteem. (And bullying doesn't?) So I don't think that one is going to fly.

I think we should back the NRA and give every kid a gun. That way they will respect each other and bullying problem. . ..gone!

Think about how many fewer teachers and security personal would be needed!


(Please don't take this too seriously)