Foxborough Makes Bullying Prevention a Priority

A task force on bullying presented Foxborough’s school committee with results of a survey on bullying during Monday night’s meeting.

Judith Sims-Knight, professor at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and Dr. Ray Knight, chairman of the psychology department at Brandeis University, reviewed the survey results with committee members, which showed that Foxborough is only in the beginning stages of working on the problem, but is in better shape than the overall national average.

The survey, which gathered results from middle and high school students in Foxborough, had four main objectives. The survey aimed to asses the levels and types of aggression, to learn more about the experiences of targets, gather more information on cyber aggression and to develop measures that can help evaluations of school programs. 

The issue of bullying is more complex than ever before with the addition of “cyber bullying." School systems are now required by the state to implement bullying prevention measures.

One shocking result from the survey showed that 57 percent of middle school students have reported physical aggression.

“These numbers are high,” said school committee member Martha Slattery. “Sitting here looking at the numbers, I am concerned.”

Sims-Knight wanted to make it clear to the committee that physical aggression does not necessarily mean a physical fist fight.

“[Students] could have been pushed, shoved, threatened or had something taken away from them,” noted Sims-Knight.

Chairman Bruce Gardner, also expressed his concerned, especially when seeing the result that 12 percent of middle school students are targeted everyday with incidents involving cell phones and social networking sites. Cyber aggression was also found to be a sizeable problem in the High School.

Sims-Knight told the committee that their was a difference between aggression and bullying.

“The numbers are high, but we are not talking about bullying, but aggression,” she said.  

Bullying is defined as “repetitive aggression” - aggression that occurs multiple times.

As far as where the aggression is taking place, it was found that 40 percent of students are targeted outside of school. 

“Kids need to understand there are consequences in their behavior,” said  Slattery.

“The message for us going forward [is] we are working on prevention – to teach kids to interact in a healthy way,” said assistant Superintendent Debra Spinelli. “Everything that is observed, [heard about or is rumored] is investigated.”

Superintendent Dr. Christopher Martes noted that the task force is going to be diving further into the survey results this summer.

“It is a complex problem, there is no simple solution,” noted Spinelli.