Anti-Bullying Laws In School

What an encouraging map! The 46 darker green states pictured above have enacted Anti-Bullying laws. What can your school do to ensure that bullying is eradicated from your school? Here are three important tips.

1. Focus on the social environment of the school. In order to reduce bullying, it is important to change the social climate of the school and the social norms with regards to bullying. This requires the efforts of everyone in the school environment—teachers, administrators, counselors, school nurses, school librarians, other non-teaching staff (such as bus drivers, custodians, and/or cafeteria workers), parents, and students.
   
   
2. Assess bullying at your school. Adults are not always very good at estimating the nature and prevalence of bullying at their school. As a result, it can be quite useful to administer an anonymous questionnaire to students about bullying. A number of bullying prevention programs listed in the Catalog of Resources include these measures.
   
   
3. Obtain staff and parent support for bullying prevention. Bullying prevention should not be the sole responsibility of any single individual at a school. To be most effective, bullying prevention efforts require buy-in from the majority of the staff and from parents. However, bullying prevention efforts should still begin even if immediate support from all isn't achievable. Usually, more and more people will join the effort once they see what it's accomplishing.