Tag: colorado trust

103/365 Bullying in Colorado: Part 7 of 7

This 7-part series will cover the history of bullying legislation and anti-bullying efforts within the state of Colorado beginning with the first definition of bullying by the Legislature in 2001.

What is to be Done?

The threat of bullying is visible. Schools with bullying cultures exhibit high rates of absenteeism, lower scores on academic exams, and reports from students of fear for their safety. Each news story that reports youth peer violence or teen suicide acts as a reminder of the work to be done. This series has worked to build an understanding of the policy, non-profit and academic work around issues of bullying in Colorado’s public schools. The State’s definition and reporting requirements around bullying are considered to be comparable to those of other states in the nation (Sacco, Baird, Silbaugh, Corredor, Casey, & Doherty, 2012; USDOE, 2011).

The law not only outlines a clear definition of bullying, but has been bolstered to include annual reporting requirements designed to longitudinally track incidents of bullying across Colorado’s schools as well. Additionally, the state has taken action to provide direct access for means of anonymously reporting bullying and channeling those reports to the proper authorities (CO, 16-15.8-101, 2007). Similarly, in the last decade, Colorado has seen an increase in non-profit activity aimed at stemming bullying in its schools. These efforts have provided financial support for school and community efforts (Colorado Trust, 2008; Colorado Legacy Foundation, 2011).

They have worked to bring the findings of their efforts to the public so that others involved in the work might benefit and avoid making early mistakes based on access to research that speaks specifically to the problem of bullying within Colorado schools.

At the national level, work has been done to provide a clear understanding of bullying within Colorado schools with protected classes (GLSEN, 2001) and across all youth populations (Levy et al., 2012; USDOE, 2011). These findings both point to a dire need for intervention if there is to be hope for making Colorado schools safe places of learning and community as well as speaking to which efforts and strategies have been successful across geographies.

At a more intimate level, social scientists have been working in individual schools to understand the cultures in which American youth are developing (Clark, 2007; Pascoe, 2011). They find a culture desperate for adult presence and a need for the adults already in learning spaces to be more mindful and caring in their language and actions. Their work puts a face on the numbers and statistics often attached to instances of bullying and the argument for greater efforts to fight it. Each of the pieces necessary to make a true and positive difference in the cultures and communities of Colorado schools is set in place.

The problem is identified and possible solutions have been tested and shared. The policy is in place to make these efforts central to the work of educators, and there is no lack of national data supporting such a focus.

Necessary now are two components. The first is a confluence of all of the above factors through an act of public will to make our schools safer. The second, and inevitable, component is the time it will take to move our schools from environments where students fear ridicule and harassment to spaces where they feel free, cared for, and accepted for who they are.

102/365 Bullying in Colorado: Part 6 of 7

This 7-part series will cover the history of bullying legislation and anti-bullying efforts within the state of Colorado beginning with the first definition of bullying by the Legislature in 2001.

Where is the Work Being Done?

Though the law established a state grant program for anti-bullying initiatives beginning in November 2011, as of this writing, no such office or program has been established. This is not to be taken as a lack of movement within the state toward responding to and preventing bullying. A number of state and national organizations have taken up the cause of keeping Colorado’s students safe in our schools and online.

Perhaps the most visible in Colorado is the work of the Colorado Legacy Foundation. In April of 2011, as 11-1254 was moving through the Legislature, the Legacy Foundation convened a Statewide Bullying Prevention Summit with the intent of learning from the experiences of efforts around the state and setting a way forward for eliminating bullying in Colorado schools. From that summit emerged “A Statewide Blueprint for Bullying Prevention.” This document draws from national and local findings from previous efforts and attempts to pull them all together toward a strategic vision.

Primarily, the document takes its framework from the 2011 “Best Practices in Bullying Prevention,” from the U.S. Departments of Education and Health And Human Services. The framework takes as its core tenets the following ten strategies:

  • Commit to provide leadership to create and sustain a positive, respectful school climate.
  • Form or identify an existing team to coordinate bullying prevention efforts.
  • Regularly assess and monitor school climate including the nature of bullying and effectiveness of bullying prevention efforts.
  • Garner staff, parent, and community support and build partnerships.
  • Establish or revise and enforce school policies and procedures related to best practices in bullying prevention and intervention.
  • Train all staff in bullying awareness, prevention, and appropriate intervention.
  • Increase active adult supervision in hot spots where bullying occurs.
  • Intervene immediately, consistently, equitably, and appropriately when bullying occurs.
  • Integrate time into academic and social activities for teaching students bullying prevention skills including awareness, responding, and reporting.
  • Continue to implement, monitor, and update bullying prevention efforts over time.

Not surprisingly, some version of these same strategies had been identified two years earlier in the results of the Colorado Trust’s program evaluation. The Trust’s learning curve had even identified possible bumps in the road such as their identification of parent and family involvement in anti-bullying work as extremely difficult.

Rather than taking the 10 strategies wholesale, the summit participants attempted a “frugal innovation” approach to changing school culture and behavior in the interest of preventing bullying. They identified three key strategies:

  1. Leverage existing state and district standards, data, and accountability structures,
  2. Build authentic partnerships with youth,
  3. Foster creative collaborations with families and community-based organizations.

From these three strategies, the Blueprint outlines specific activities schools and districts can implement to build stronger and safer community cultures. Not surprisingly, these activities and strategies include approaches that, like the Safe-2-Tell legislation, do not necessarily center around bullying behaviors, but take as their goal plotting a course to the kinds of communities that produce empathetic, active citizens rather than attempting to combat an unwanted behavior.

This preventative, proactive stance also aligns with the Colorado Trust’s concerns about the immovability of bullying attitudes and proclivities in high schools relative to elementary and middle schools. If schools and communities took the time to attend to positive behaviors early on, perhaps later-year bullying would no longer be a concern.

Nationally, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University in partnership with the Born This Way Foundation have dedicated a significant amount of resources to accomplishing a task similar to the mission of Colorado’s Department of Education’s efforts to aggregate and disseminate the best practices in bullying prevention. In “Bullying in a Networked Era: A Literature Review” Berkman outlined not only strategies for combating bullying behavior in schools, but illuminated the norms around bullying as well.

Drawing on more than 100 studies of bullying behavior from across the country, the literature review successfully describes the context, participants, and norms surrounding bullying behavior. Unlike the Legacy Foundation or Colorado Trust efforts that identified bullying as a problem and then offer solutions, Levy et al. worked to help educators understand the structures that might be in place within their learning organizations that could contribute to bullying behavior including gender norms, socio-economic status and others.

In addition to the efforts above, scholars and academics have started focusing their research more intently on the study of school cultures and bullying behaviors. In his 2005 book Hurt: Inside the world of today’s teenagers, Chap Clark engages in an ethnographic study of adolescents within a single school district in order that he might better understand the cultural and social forces shaping younger generations.

Clark describes what he finds as a collection of lost, forgotten, and invisible children. While some of his work points toward a golden age fallacy, Clark interprets what he finds as an indication that the youth he encounters have been left alone or ignored by adults who might otherwise be taking an active role in their lives. Such an understanding is similar to the Legacy Foundation’s contention of the importance of adults in young people’s live modeling and explicitly teaching the value of standing up to injustice and bullying.

In her 2011 Dude You’re a Fag: Masculinity and sexuality in high school, C.J. Pascoe reported findings similar to Clarks, describing students’ frequent usage of the term “fag” to demean their fellow classmates. Such language was encountered so frequently, Pascoe claimed, that it often appeared as though community members did not register its use.

Pascoe also reported a norm outside of Clark’s contention of neglect. She wrote that adults within the school where she conducted her study were also implicit in creating environments of heteronormativity and homophobia that led to or passively authorized students’ bullying behaviors.

Such a claim matches with the GLSEN (2011) survey results. Twenty-seven percent of GLSEN survey respondents reported regularly hearing “staff make negative remarks about someone’s gender expression, and 18 percent regularly heard school staff make homophobic remarks” (p. 1).

The work of Clark, Pascoe, and other researchers attempting to document the lives and cultures of American schools with the goal of understanding norms, bullying, and how they are shaped brings a more localized and personal understanding to the work of bullying prevention. Combined with the work of state and national organizations, this research can provide a fuller perspective of the causes, effects, and strategies of prevention surrounding bullying behavior.

99/365 Bullying in Colorado: Part 3 of 7

This 7-part series will cover the history of bullying legislation and anti-bullying efforts within the state of Colorado beginning with the first definition of bullying by the Legislature in 2001.

Colorado’s Trust in Anti-Bullying

Absent specific action by the Legislature and given the variance in school and district policies given the lack of specific guidance by SB 01-080, the grant-making foundation The Colorado Trust stepped in in 2005 with a four-year anti-bullying initiative that allocated $8.6 million to 45 grantees and 78 schools across 40 of Colorado’s 64 counties. Districts, schools, and community organizations receiving these funds reported reaching approximately 50,000 Coloradans through their efforts.

Arguably more important than the reach of the Trust’s initiative were its results. Through an independent evaluation that included surveys of approximately 6,000 student and 1,500 adults, focus groups with students, and in-depth interviews with grantees, the Trust’s Bullying Prevention Initiative (BPI) found positive results in reports of school context and culture as well as decreases in reports of bullying behavior following the enactment of its funded efforts.

From the Trust’s independent evaluation of BPI, several key findings were uncovered that stretched across grantees. Chief among these was the need for anti-bullying efforts to be integrated into the daily operations of learning spaces rather than as add-on or auxiliary programs that might be seen as in competition with other school programs. The Trust also found that anti-bullying efforts were most difficult in high school and that it “may be too late by then anyway” (2008). In the Findings Report, the Trust reported, “High school, however, grows more complex because bullying occurs below the adult radar – such as cyberbullying. Students also are less likely to ask adults to intervene unless they have trusted adults to help them” (2008, p. 4).

This finding is of particular interest for a number of reasons. Chief among them is the use of the term cyberbullying though online spaces were not included in the State’s initial definition of bullying. The finding speaks to the holes in the State’s attempt to protect its youth from bullying. Also notable is the research’s determination of the increased difficulty of alleviating bullying in students’ later years of schooling. While significant improvements in preventing bullying were reported across elementary and middle school populations, such shifts were more difficult in high schools.

Unfortunately, the Trust’s study concluded in 2008, so the ability to evaluate the possible persistence of the Initiative’s effects is impossible.  This leaves on the table the question of whether implementing the efforts that were successful in creating safer schools in the younger years could have the double effect of making older students safer as well. Later, this paper will examine those efforts found to be successful by the Trust and other similar organizations.

Finally, while claims of causation are doubtful, the Trust found a positive correlation between schools with below-average instances of bullying and above-average CSAP scores. “Almost 33 percent of schools below the average frequency of bullying in the first year of the initiative were above the average CSAP score, while only 14 percent of schools reporting a higher frequency of bullying were above the average CSAP score” (p. 7). This finding is not surprising. One would expect students attending schools where they experience less fear for their safety would have greater access to learning and achievement. Still, such a finding is helpful to those policymakers whose decisions are driven by test scores rather than a more holistic understanding of students.

In 2009, the Colorado Trust ended its anti-bullying grant program, and turned its funding to other programmatic goals it saw as aligned to its mission. Still, in the five years of funding and research, the Trust was able to gather information that painted a clearer picture of bullying in Colorado schools than had previously existed and added to the burgeoning corpus of research dedicated to understanding how to prevent and reduce bullying in schools.