Aftermath

In algebra, we are asked to find solutions to problems that contain a number of missing variables. The time it takes us to respond to the problem and the quality of our answer usually depends upon how much information we are given about both sides of the equation. The more limited the information we have, the more dependent we become on our ability to guess at possible solutions.

Peter Van Geem was faced with just this type of problem on October 2, 2002. Three boys accused of brutally bullying a single victim. How did this combination of four boys lead to bullying and what combinations of possible solutions would lead to the right one? The correct answer depended entirely upon the information he could gather about each variable.

In the hours that followed the incident, Van Geem asked his assistant principal, Beverly Sept, to investigate. As is normally the procedure when a serious incident occurs on a school bus, Van Geem said the transportation supervisor was contacted and asked to pull the bus’ surveillance tape.

“My reaction to the video when I first saw it was, ‘holy smokes!’ Van Geem said. “I was shocked.” Few could have imagined that boys so young could possess such raw rage.

The assistant principal interviewed other students on the bus, and the boys who were involved, and “they pretty much came clean,” Van Geem says. “We had already made decisions about suspensions of the kids involved before we even saw it (the tape).”

The boys who were seen punching and even kicking Casey in the face were suspended from school for a week and from the bus for a month. The bus driver was reportedly disciplined as well but, while the details are confidential, according to Jan Anderson, the director of transportation at Eugene 4-J Schools, she is still driving a bus for the district, though now assigned to a different route. The Woodruffs find this fact appalling and feel it demonstrates what they perceive to be the district’s casual attitude about bullying, at least Casey’s bullying.

For the Woodruffs, the incident on the bus was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. After more than a year of random, yet progressively violent attacks on their son, Ciel says that they had to take matters into their own hands. After filing numerous harassment forms with the school and police, many meetings with the principals, vice principals, and teachers from two schools, and the assistant superintendent of schools -- all to no avail -- they say they could no longer simply give Casey empty assurances that the bullying would stop.

“I’ve fussed about this for so long, Ciel says. “We just couldn’t get anyone to care. We were just so frustrated.”

It was only out of frustration, Ciel says, that Casey’s father, Roger Woodruff, decided to show the tape to the ABC affiliate station in Eugene to see if they could help. That decision is how the world would ultimately learn about what happened to Casey Wooodruff.

“When my husband showed it to them,” Ciel says, “they said they wanted an exclusive. The whole thing was a complete shock to us. We found the whole world reacted the way we did when we saw the tape.”

Public outrage was short-lived, Ciel says, but the publicity of the event did probably force the school district to take some action to address the bullying. After the Woodruffs were interviewed on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” the Assistant Superintendent of Eugene 4-J Schools, Jim Slemp, gave the Woodruffs the choice of moving Casey to another school. Their initial response was to keep him home until they received the assurances they needed that Casey would be safe in school.

During the weeks that Casey stayed home, the twins were also given an opportunity to change schools. They were not asked to change schools; they were given the opportunity to change. They accepted, and are now being bused to another school at the district’s expense. Casey remains at Monroe Middle School. The boys will not attend the same school for the remainder of this year, and possibly not again until high school. This concerns some youth violence experts.

“What’s disturbing about this case,” says Stephen Smith of the IVDB, “is that these are sixth graders, and the severity of the interaction seems much more involved than what we might consider typical. If they were already that focused on just one child, the scary part is that they will probably still stay that focused unless effective behavior supports are put in place. We know from battered spouse research that kind of focus doesn’t just go away by itself.”

In the aftermath of the attention Casey’s incident received, Peter Van Geem felt a bit like he was dodging flaming arrows. Few recognized that the incident occurred just 20 days into the school year. In Van Geem’s view, it was still too early in the year to draw definitive conclusions that the twins, whose family situation was stressful, still were planning to target Casey for bullying. After all, contrary to his administration’s requests, Van Geem says that Casey failed to report any ongoing bullying.

Another problem, which continued after the incident, was that communication between Casey’s parents and the school was primarily to the assistant principal. After the fight on Casey’s last day of fifth grade, the Woodruffs had been instructed that the vice principal was the person with whom they should discuss behavior problems. Thus, there was a layer between the principal and Casey’s parents where information critical to Van Geem’s ability to effectively solve the problems may have been underemphasized or, perhaps, not communicated at all.
One such issue was the question of the specificity of the twins as the ringleaders. Though Ciel Woodruff says that the assistant principal, Beverly Sept, was very well aware of the specific history between Casey and the twins, Van Geem says he had no personal knowledge of this. Thus, he hadn’t communicated with the school’s teachers to look out for Casey when he was in the presence of the other boys.

“I don’t know that at anytime the situation was communicated to us as being that concerning,” Van Geem said. The assistant principal was given a list of students who Casey needed to be separated from which included the twins, Van Geem added, “I may be wrong, but I don’t think the twins were indicated as being any worse than any others.

“Given the same set of circumstances – had we been a little more aware of the problems between these boys, we might have taken things a little differently.”

The fact that victims of bullying often do not report what is happening to them is a very real challenge for administrators. Often children are embarrassed to report that they have been victimized and fear further retaliation from bullies who are disciplined based upon their reports. Children are also less likely to report bullying if they feel that their reports will not be taken seriously.

In middle school, bullying becomes more serious and the potential for significant physical harm inflicted by weapons or severe beatings escalates, according to Rick Beal, a school violence consultant quoted in a Louisiana newspaper. He says that most students don’t report bullying because they think teachers will not do anything about it.

“Whether that is true or not, it doesn't matter,” he said. “That is what they perceive.”

And, indeed, this was Casey’s perception.

“There is no doubt that the bus driver situation was a real problem and things should have never happened that way,” Van Geem reflected. “That was a huge, huge issue. Had the bus driver simply been paying attention to what was going on, let alone tried to intervene, it would have never gotten to the point it did.”

One immediate response to Casey’s attack was that Van Geem stepped up efforts to initiate a program that teaches techniques of effective behavior support to bus drivers and will help connect behavioral systems between the schools and drivers. The program has already been successfully implemented in nearby Lebanon Community Schools.

Taught at every grade and every school in the district, Kerry Luber, director of student services for Lebanon Community Schools, says the program hinges on three fundamental points: Be safe. Be respectful, and be responsible.

“The new program,” says Jim Watson, effective behavior support coordinator for Eugene 4-J Schools, “will help drivers know what the expectations are and what the rules of the building are and make the bus just an extension of the classroom.”

“Change happens slowly,” cautions Luber. It takes three to five years of the program implementation to see a cultural change in the school, he says. Key to this success, however, is that every teacher and every administrator in the school has to have a consistent policy and a consistent belief that bullying is destructive to the school environment and that it will not be tolerated.

In the End, a Climate for Change

In the final examination, most people agree that what happened to Casey Woodruff on October 2 should not have occurred.

Van Geem’s point that each student deserves a fresh start in a new school is a valid consideration. Should a child’s behavioral history in elementary school continue to haunt them as they matriculate into middle and high school? Does overlooking their history put other students at risk?

Perhaps other answers allow for a compromise. In this situation, had the boys been allowed to attend separate middle schools or, at the very least, been placed in separate classes, things may have been different. We will never know, but Ciel Woodruff says, that’s an opportunity she wishes Casey had.

The Woodruffs feel the school district’s response was inadequate and insufficient to protect their son, and more should have and could have been done to protect Casey.

In the Woodruffs case, they feel that the response by law enforcement officials was equally as troubling in Casey’s situation.

Ciel Woodruff says that when she stood up to read her impact statement to the court, the judge rolled his eyes when she talked about the affect the repeated bullying has had on her son and family. Casey’s father and brother were so intimidated by this action, that they sat down rather than face similar treatment. When the judge was questioned about this later, he indicated that he had something in his contact lenses and that the Woodruffs had misinterpreted his actions. Even if this is true, Ciel says, that had he not refused to watch the video tape of the school bus incident, she is certain his actions would have been mores respectful of Casey.

It was the sum total of the lack of validation of their son and his treatment by the school bus driver, the school’s administration and members of law enforcement that have caused the Woodruffs to consider taking legal action against the district. And they are not alone in feeling that someone should have taken the bullying reports more seriously and intervened sooner.

Parents of a 13-year-old Pennsylvania boy filed suit in Federal courts in November after reportedly six years of having the complaints of their son’s bullying allegedly ignored by school officials. They ultimately withdrew him and enrolled him in a private school.

These cases may be the first of many if districts are slow to take action against bullies. According to Dorthea M. Ross, Ph.D. and author of Childhood Bullying and Teasing says that a cardinal rule in helping a child cope with an event that they perceive threatening is to always, always accept the child’s judgment as fact, no matter how unreasonable it may seem to an adult. This may indeed be the new golden rule for schools and law enforcement to consider.

The benefits for taking reports seriously seem to be easily justified. Apart from the long-term affects bullying has on its victims, Ross says that a child who is a bully at the age of eight has a one-in-four chance of ending up with a criminal record by the age of 30.

But the systems for taking these reports seriously still seem to be lacking as evidenced by the Woodruff family’s experience, as well as that of the family in Pennsylvania.

“So much of this process was unexpected,” Ciel says. Neither she nor her family imagined that solving the problem of Casey’s repetitive bullying, and ensuring that the boys who bullied him were punished, would turn into such an uphill battle, of phone call after phone call. She says this is particularly shocking in a community that had already experienced a school tragedy that some have linked, at least in part, to bullying.

“I’m just walking around in this mist,” Ciel says. “Nobody’s there. Nobody cares. Everybody says what a terrible thing it is but, when you get right down to it, there is nobody that is put in a position to take care of things like this.”

In the weeks that followed the incident, the amount of time spent following up with the school and the police ultimately cost Ciel her job. Casey, too, has witnessed the toll the events have taken on his family. Ciel worries that the way his case was treated by the school and law enforcement officials has left him victimized a second time.

“What has amazed me through this whole thing was watching Casey become a victim,” Ciel says. “I watched this show about a girl who killed herself because she was bullied. I thought, ‘This is the child that’s happening to when it doesn’t go that far.’ While it’s going on, nobody takes notice.”

But the saddest commentaries on this situation comes from Casey himself.

When asked what he would push the school to change as a result of what happened to him, Casey said, “I would push them to care.”

A recent study revealed that only 30 percent of students in public schools believe their teachers care about them personally, and only 33 percent say their teachers challenge them to do better. Experts know that how connected youngsters feel at school is an important factor in protecting them from extreme emotional distress, drug abuse, and violence.

Taking a child seriously and empathizing with him when he admits that he has been bullied is one way that administrators and teachers can show children that they care.

“Perhaps the key lesson to be learned by these events,” says Beverly Glenn, director of the Hamilton Fish Institute on School and Community Violence and former teacher, “is that, as we respond to situations involving violence in schools, we never take our focus off of what’s going on from the victim’s perspective.

“How a child and his or her family internalize the events could play a larger role later on. Whether it is by filing a law suit against the school or, worst of all, by a child feeling so marginalized that they later decide to take their own life, or take the lives of others to get the attention they feel they deserve, everyone within the school needs to help validate and support children who are victims of violence.”

Having a consistent policy for dealing with reports of bullying is critical, says Jeff Sprague, co-director of the Institute on Violence and Destructive Behavior and consortium member for the Hamilton Fish Institute.

“If districts don’t have a uniform policy for harassment, they’re certainly not going to have a consistent response.”

Jim Slemp, the assistant superintendent of Eugene 4-J Schools, says that Monroe Middle School has a Code of Students’ Rights and Responsibilities that includes policies on bullying that is sent to all families and reviewed with staff and students each fall. Experts agree that one of the first steps to combating bullying is to develop a written policy against bullying and harassment and make sure it -- and the punishments for violating the policies – are well-known to the students and teachers.

Monroe Middle School also has programs in place to combat bullying and to help students learn positive social skills. In fact, Monroe is one of 27 schools out of 44 schools in Eugene that has implemented Second Step, a program developed by the Committee for Children that is designed to teach anger management and conflict resolution skills. The program is recognized by the Department of Education as “Exemplary” to teach socialization skills. Another program, Steps to Respect, specifically addresses bullying and is being implemented at Monroe.

Monroe Middle School participates in both of these programs voluntarily at the initiative of Van Geem.

“The school the boys came from [in elementary school] also had Second Step training,” says Jim Watson. “But Second Step is more designed for the general population to foster values of empathy, impulse control, and anger management. It’s not going to take care of kids with serious behavior problems, but it does create a calmer climate to handle kids with those serious behavior problems.”

The best hope for long-term change, says Stephen Smith, are interventions that focus on encouraging and rewarding positive behavior, teach expected behavior and pro-social behavioral skills, and provide clear, consistent, and effective consequences designed to both help correct the problem behavior and ensure the safety of the other members of the school community .

“We already know how to punish kids,” says Smith. “But we need to focus on now is teaching positive behaviors and pro-social skill development so children can succeed.”

In fact, according to a report from the U.S. Department of Education on the preparation and qualifications of teachers, a majority of the nation’s teachers consider themselves well prepared for the responsibilities of their jobs only in one category – classroom management and discipline.

To realize the focus suggested by Smith on skill development and positive reinforcement, will require a shift in traditional thinking on discipline. Most schools policies are punishment based. The changes in those systems must go hand-in-hand with changing the perceptions that bullying is a normal part of a child’s school experience. Every child must feel like a vital part of the school experience and there are ways to achieve that.

“Perhaps if we can succeed in creating a school climate that fosters positive discipline, academic success and emotional as well as physical safety,” says Beverly Glenn, “we will be able to strike the proper balance, between responding to early warning signs of violence, on the one hand, and unfairly stigmatizing children, on the other.”

In the end, as Ted Tull says, authority can be passed, but responsibility cannot. We all have a responsibility to Casey Woodruff and, for that matter, to each of the boys who bullied him. By searching for someone else to whom we can pass the buck, we ultimately end up never addressing the hard problems. Research shows that the outcome for bullies is usually worse than for their victims. Bullies tend to become more hostile over time, losing the support and admiration of their peers as they grow up and frequently getting into serious trouble. Children like Casey Woodruff stand to end up marginalized, mad, despondent, and potentially dangerous to themselves and others. And the public loses out on the potential that each has to contribute in positive ways to our society. In the end, the buck has to stop with each one of us: parent, teacher, administrator, lawmaker, and community member. ?

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