Bully bill shouldn’t be pushed around

The Alberta School Board Association is currently up in arms over Bill 206, a legislation that could very well take the punishment for bullying out of the hands of educators and leave it to the Alberta government. While it means an increase in red tape for teachers and school administrators, they have little right to complain. Bullying is an ever-present issue, and it clearly hasn’t improved much in their hands.

ASBA reps say that the punishment for bullying should depend on the students involved — but why? Every able-minded kid knows that bullying is wrong, so why does one deserve a more mild punishment than the others? At the present time, bullying is going to depend on the school in which it happens and the teacher in charge of dealing with it. There’s no way at present to ensure it’s being handled with equal levels of seriousness from case to case.

Opposition of the bill must assume that all teachers are equally willing to handle bullying earnestly. But how many of us have witnessed teachers being a little too “buddy-buddy” with the kids responsible for half the teasing? It isn’t that rare for the jerk who throws things at the lame kids to high-five the science teacher the next day. Teachers, like most people, develop biases. They can’t be treated like insensitive machines and won’t always be reliable in punishing the proper people to an appropriate extent.

The bill also promises to ban weapons and drug paraphernalia from schools in addition to handling cases of online bullying. These fall into the category of aspects of the problem that should have been dealt with and properly standardized ages ago. While schools have done just fine in punishing young people for obvious offences like weapons and drug use, we’ve all heard the stories of schools’ inability to patrol and punish online bullying — a fact that cruel-minded kids tend to know and exploit.

It’s granted that the present bill isn’t perfect — there are flaws in it as with every legislation. The biggest matter that should be dealt with within the bill is the suggested punishment. At present, Bill 206 talks about a special-educational program for bullies without suggesting what sort of form it may have or how it might be funded. It’s simply an ill-conceived, bare-bones idea of a punishment that doesn’t go far enough. Kids old enough to bully have been told a million times not to, but their skin has gotten thicker, and ultimately sticking them in a classroom outside of school hours will only further agitate them. In the end it’s really no better then a regular detention.

That’s why I’d like to see these kids serving community service sentences. Preferably in little orange jumpsuits with those pointy sticks for picking up trash, and at a location near their schools. While this may not seem very sincere, there are few things more horrifying to kids than embarrassment. If you want them to take it seriously, we need to enforce it properly and in a matter that will matter to them.

While a legislation would standardize bullying punishments, it should also give it a more serious tone. Kids may be kids, but if a child is knowingly being cruel, it might be more effective to punish them in a more adult manner, and the legislation provides such a solution. The bottom line is that when the schools are examined on an individual level, there’s little difference between bullying and plain old harassment, and it’s time that we start looking at them the same way. Sugar coating things and claiming every bullying situation is a unique situation isn’t going to solve the problem — it’ll only slow down the process.