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Casey Woodruff Though some 12-year-old boys have already experienced their first growth spurt of puberty, Casey Woodruff isn’t one of those. He’s small and thin and still looks more like a little boy than the man he will soon become. Perhaps his slight build or his quiet and polite manner had something to do with the reason two boys in his neighborhood chose to pick on him relentlessly. From almost the moment he moved into his new neighborhood and school, Casey’s mother says he had endured almost daily bullying at the hands twins who lived around the corner from him. Over the course of a year, Ciel Woodruff says, “They punched, kicked, kneed, stole his money right out of his pants pockets, called him ‘fag,’ ‘gay,’ ‘girl,’ and many more crude things.” The twins brought other kids into their band of bullies until, eventually, Casey had no friends left. The price of friendship with Casey, it seemed, was similar treatment, so no one wanted to get too close to him. Studies have concluded, in fact, that you cannot intimidate one child in front of others without making the others afraid. Throughout the year, Casey was the target of the boys’ repeated kicks, name-calling and general harassment. Ciel said the boys tortured Casey “through the summers and school, at the park, bus stop, on the bus, on field trips, in our own yard, and on school grounds.” There where times when the bus driver separated the children on the route by making them sit in assigned seats, a strategy often used by bus drivers for behavior management. The problem, says Ciel, was that it was inconsistently enforced. “Casey knew that wherever he sat, it would happen,” Ciel said. “They’d sit right behind him or next to him. He was bullied 29 days out of 30.” The last day of fifth grade classes, just minutes after the final class bell rang, Casey was badly beaten up again. When he got home, his parents called the school to report the incident but they were informed that nothing could be done as school had already been dismissed for the year. His teacher, however, notified the school where Casey would be attending junior high, about the consistent bullying problems. During the summer before Casey entered sixth grade, the Woodruffs met with the assistant principal of Monroe Middle School, Beverly Sept, to discuss the bullying problems Casey had experienced the previous year. At the meeting, the Woodruffs provided a list of children who had been a party to the now-growing group of boys who often joined the twins in harassing Casey. Sept wanted to give all of the boys a chance to start the new school year in a new school with a clean slate but encouraged Casey to help them by reporting any incidents that might occur. What the Woodruffs said they really wanted was to get Casey into another school, as far away from the ringleaders – the twins – and their followers as possible. Failing that, they asked that Casey be placed in separate classes and on a separate bus from the twins, but each of these requests were denied. School officials hoped the boys would simply be able to work out their differences peacefully. Most current research on bullying states this is not advised. Though the school offered anti-bullying curricula to its students, it would appear that the focus was on teaching the children rather than learning what the research was telling the adults at school. So, for the second year in a row, Casey was again in the same classes and was assigned to the same bus as his bullies. The bus driver was also the same who had become familiar with the problems between the boys the previous year. The Woodruffs were not surprised when the bullying continued. This time, however, Casey kept quiet; a decision he says he now realizes was wrong but experience had taught him that reporting the bullying had done nothing to change the frequency of his attacks. Back-of-the-bus Brawl Between the first day of the 2002 school year and when the televised bus incident occurred on October 2, Monroe Middle School Principal Peter Van Geem said Casey had only reported one bullying incident. In that situation, the twins, according to Casey, reached into his pants to take some money, pushed him against the lockers several times, taunted him by throwing his money back and forth to each other, and then insulted him. Van Geem said that a teacher who observed the last moments of the incident scolded all of the boys involved, including Casey, and told them to get out of the hall. Precisely who said what to whom and what started the attack on Casey on the bus is officially unknown. While there was an audio track on the surveillance tape, the copy provided to the Woodruff family was edited and did not include the audio portion. But when the Woodruffs were given the opportunity to watch a tape that included the audio portion, they said you could clearly hear the twins taunting Casey. What was more surprising is that the bus was parked in front of the school and the bus driver was seated in the front, apparently unaware or unconcerned by the boys swinging on the seat backs to kick Casey. The audio portion of the tape later revealed that the driver was talking to others outside of the doors of the bus. She was apparently completely unaware of the back-of-the-bus brawl taking place. So, though help to intervene was just feet away, it was not sought. “The bus driver, who was clearly not driving,” says Stephen Smith, evaluation coordinator for the Institute on Violence and Destructive Behavior (IVDB), “should have observed, recognized, and attended to what was going on and intervened in some manner – either directly, or by getting help if they felt that the situation was personally dangerous.” Some bus drivers choose not to intervene because they are fear they could be overpowered by students physically larger than they are. Another issue has to do with what happens if a driver reports a student, or students, for inappropriate behavior. Ted Tull, administrative director for the National Association of State Directors of Pupil Transportation Services says that it is critical that drivers know that if they report discipline problems on their buses that the school will take them seriously. “Maybe a driver has written up kids, written up kids, and nothing has ever occurred, so she says, ‘to heck with it,’” Tull says. “That doesn’t help our kids, but you are a product of what you learn, all of us are - you, me, and the drivers out there.” Though there is no specific knowledge that any of these issues were involved in Casey’s situation, they are factors in the day-to-day operations of school buses and affect the quality and quantity of incident reporting. In Casey’s situation, had the bus driver had concerns over her ability to intervene between the boys safely, there were other adults within feet of her bus. “We have between two to four adults in front of the school everyday,” Van Geem explained. “We always have supervision in front of the school. If something had been going on in the bus that the driver had taken notice of and needed help with, all she had to do was step out and ask for help because we’re right there.” And so, Casey was pummeled and kicked for approximately 10 painful minutes. Who was ultimately responsible for not protecting Casey -- the bus driver or the school district, is debatable. Some would say the bus driver; others would say that the bus driver is simply an employed agent of the district. Ted Tull says the answer is clear. “You can pass authority, but you can’t pass responsibility,” Tull says.
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