Last week’s Santana high school shooting in California indicates that, like Columbine, the shooter may have been really abused and harassed by some of his peers. Today’s newspaper has two gut-wrenching commentaries by adults who suffered similarly in school. One’s titled First, go after the kids picking on kids, and another Who says ‘words will never hurt’?
I started thinking about the schools my kids have attended. With the exception of my oldest son who spent 3 years at a public middle school and 1 at a high school — both over a thousand kids — the schools have all been less than a hundred. There were plenty of incidents of teasing at these small schools, just like there were at the small schools I attended as a kid. But in most cases, the teachers and staff at these small schools spent a good chunk of time trying to deal with these problems as learning situations, not just discipline problems.
Spur of the moment problem-solving sessions, school-wide discussion of values, behavior policies developed with student input, all were common at these schools. And because the schools were small, the teachers couldn’t help but to hear about/notice when a pattern of bullying or harassment began to occur. Because the schools were small, the teachers knew the kids better as individuals. The chances were much greater that a picked-on kid could confide in a teacher, that a teacher would notice a kid who was bothered about something, that a teacher would have enough of a relationship with the kids doing the harassing that their efforts to intervene could make a difference.
With schools of a thousand or more (both Santana and Columbine had 2000+), there’s really no way to fairly expect teachers and staff to pay attention to this stuff. They’ve got to be concerned with ‘crowd control,’ not the psyches of individual kids or small group dynamics.
I wrote in my weblog a couple weeks ago about how my kids may have missed out academically by attending a whole variety of alternative schools. I realize now that they also may have been spared a lot of bad experiences, either as the victims of harassment or as the harassers themselves. Was the value of this social/emotional education they received worth more than what they may have missed in academic breadth and rigor? I wish they could’ve had both, of course, but if forced to choose, I’d rather err on the side of academic shortcomings than emotional scars.
And it occurs to me now that as our local school district considers a bond issue to build a new middle school to house a thousand kids, I have a civic responsibility to write a letter to the editor about this issue. We pay a hidden price for the efficiency of huge schools.