Tags
books, bullying, He Was Weird, Newport Kentucky, schools, teachers
When I read about this last week, I had already written my weekly post for Peaceful Rampage and therefore, I thought I’d wait a week to see if there were any further developments. To my knowledge, there are none. The teacher in Newport, Kentucky who was suspended by her school for speaking out against bullying, remains suspended. If this is the first time you’ve heard about the story, then click the link below.
http://www.fox19.com/story/35501794/school-suspends-newport-teacher-for-speaking-out-about-bullying
In short, here we have a teacher who is concerned about bullying at her school, so she speaks out about it. The school in response suspends the teacher for the rest of the school year without pay. Furthermore, the school has refused to speak out about bullying and even downplaying, it stating that the bullying problems were down to that teacher’s lack of classroom management. However, bullying has been reported to have happened throughout the entire school.
What we have is a school who wants to downplay or deny any bullying going on at their school. Furthermore, they take action against a teacher who is brave enough to speak out about it. So, chalk up another victory for bullies.
My question is when are schools going to own up to the fact that bullying still goes on. While I can understand that no school is comfortable with bullying happening at it, the answer is not to sweep it under the carpet. This happens all too often and I had no problem highlighting the point in “He Was Weird.” Furthermore, the worse thing the school can do is to take action against the person(s) who speak up about it. Sometimes it’s even the victim! Instead, what we need is for schools to get it out into the open, identify all bullying and come up with effective strategies that not only stop the bullying but prevent it from happening in the future.
To buy He Was Weird, go to https://www.amazon.co.uk/He-Was-Weird-Michael-Lefevre/dp/1909740942/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1496174939&sr=1-1&keywords=he+was+weird