WILMINGTON, MA — When Matt arrived at Wilmington Middle School, one of his classmates started bullying him. It started with name-calling based on Matt’s appearance but soon involved other kids and more frequent harassment, eventually including what Matt and his mother took to be a death threat.
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But instead of punishing the boy who was bullying Matt, school administrators decided the best they could do was to keep the two apart. Because he was often bullied in gym, Matt was told he need not go to that class — and instead of eating lunch in the cafeteria, where the name-calling continued, he could spend lunch with a teacher or a receptionist.
Matt’s mother, Susan, thought that the school wasn’t taking the bullying seriously and even made the problem worse by isolating him from his classmates.
“Essentially, what they ended up doing was teach my son that the best way to deal with bullying is to ignore the matter and get special privileges, go hang out with his favorite teacher during lunch, and not teach him how to deal with the challenges of middle school and be supported,” Susan said.
After a mediation process, Matt eventually left the school.
Two other parents told Patch similar stories about bullied children who eventually had to leave the school, feeling that they suffered worse consequences than the children who bullied them. The parents and students in this story are referred to by pseudonyms.
These stories were familiar to Ellen deLara, a bullying prevention expert at Syracuse University.
“Isolating the victim does nothing to interrupt the problem,” deLara said. “In addition, it can contribute to making victims feel as if they have done something wrong.”
Stephanie Fredrick, associate director of the Alberti Center for Bullying Abuse Prevention at the State University of New York-Buffalo, said isolation can work as a short-term strategy if the target wants it, but she stressed that students who bully should face consequences that fit their actions.
“If it’s happening in gym class, on a frequent or chronic basis, you could talk about the loss of privilege (for the bully) of going to gym class,” Fredrick said.
Schools Superintendent Glenn Brand did not respond to repeated requests to discuss the handling of bullying at Wilmington schools.
The school’s current bullying policy dates to 2014 and requires the district to investigate all reports of bullying and take action if it finds the allegations “factual.” The policy requires students be taught bullying prevention, and that the schools provide assistance or counseling to both targets and perpetrators of bullying. Since joining the district over a year ago, Brand has already carried out a couple of the expert recommendations for addressing bullying, including meetings with parents. The district has a new strategic plan, written last school year, which includes guidelines for creating a “culture of inclusion” at the schools.
But parents responding to a Patch survey on school bullying said the bullying problem is acute at the middle school and that school officials do a poor job of addressing it.
“[It’s] a joke. They talk to the students, but really it’s brushed under the rug, and there is no paperwork filed,” one parent said in a response to the survey.
In addition to Matt’s mother, two other parents talked to Patch about their children being bullied at the middle school.
Tony, who is autistic and has an anxiety disorder, was bullied “everywhere,” said his mother, Sophia.
“I had at least five filed bullying reports,” Sophia said. But to her knowledge, “there was no response whatsoever” in terms of punishing the bullies.
Instead, Tony was given “special privileges” that really segregated him from other students, Sophia said. Because he had been regularly bullied in the bathroom, the school at first proposed letting him use a private bathroom but eventually assigned him an aide to accompany him throughout the school.
But the supervision was not nearly as close as promised.
“He was a target everywhere — in the hallways, in the bathroom, going to play basketball,” Sophia said. The bullies even threatened to rape him, she said, but “never once was this aide available.”
Tony was hospitalized repeatedly for mental breakdowns, she said, and she frequently had to leave work to respond to crises at school. Tony’s schoolwork also suffered; he stopped taking classes with the broader school population and was limited to special education classes.
Like Matt, Tony eventually moved to a different school.
Samantha started being bullied soon after moving into the district and starting at the middle school, said her mother, Ann — with immediate consequences for her mental health.
“She went from this happy-go-lucky little girl to this miserable little thing,” Ann said. “She wasn’t popular, she wasn’t pretty, she wasn’t skinny, she wasn’t this, she wasn’t that, it just became constant.”
In one case, a girl took a photo of Samantha on the bus, added emojis with words like “gross” and “yuck” and shared it via Snapchat, Ann said. She obtained a screenshot that another student had taken and sent it to the school.
“No action was ever taken,” Ann said. “(Samantha) went from the average B student when we moved to failing because of the bullying.”
Samantha became suicidal and was hospitalized twice before moving to a school in a district 1½ hours away.
“She’s now an honor roll student,” Ann said. “She’s thriving, she’s happy, and she’s doing so much better.”
Matt was not so lucky.
The name-calling escalated to the point where the bully threatened his life in a 100-player online shooting game called Fortnite, where participants fight to be the last person alive.
A screenshot of the message to Matt says, “kill your self or ill do it 4 u i hate u.”
When questioned by the school, the other boy said that he had meant that Matt should kill himself in the game. But another parent told Susan that the bully had told her son in school that he was going to kill Matt.
The school accepted the bully’s assertion that the threats were made only in the context of the game.
“If there were consequences, I was never made aware,” Susan said.
The implication for her son, and other students being bullied, is that they’re on their own.
“The message these kids are getting, if they’re bullied, is that nobody is going to do anything about it,” Susan said.
What happened to Matt, Tony and Samantha — including the damage to their mental health — shows how important it is to deal promptly and effectively with bullies, said deLara, the bullying prevention expert from Syracuse University.
“Bullying has immediate and long-term health and mental health impacts,” she wrote in an email to Patch. “No one wants children to suffer anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts and homicidal thoughts (among other feelings) due to going to school.”
Experts say that ending the culture of bullying at a school won’t happen quickly, and Ann hasn’t given up hope that change will come to Wilmington.
She took part along with other parents in writing a new strategic plan for the district, a process that began under Brand after he became superintendent in 2018.
She still has a child at the middle school, she said, so “I have to give them another chance.”
The Menace Of Bullies: Patch Reporting Project
As part of a national reporting project, Patch has been looking at society’s roles and responsibilities in bullying and a child’s unthinkable decision to end their own life in hopes we might offer solutions that save lives.
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Christopher Huffaker can be reached at chris.huffaker@patch.com and 412-265-8353.