Continued anti?bullying efforts on the part of Somerville public schools and the Tufts community are coinciding with hearings led by Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley to review the state's new anti?bullying law.
Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick (D) last May signed into effect the bill titled "An Act Relative to Bullying in Schools," which requires Massachusetts primary and secondary schools to develop bullying prevention plans and offer curricula on bullying.
The two hearings last month contributed to the aims of a commission chaired by Coakley that is charged with reviewing the existing laws and deciding whether additional legislation is needed for them to be effective.
Massachusetts schools were required to submit their plans to combat bullying under the new law to the state this December for approval, according to Somerville Public Schools' Director of Student Services Richard Melillo. Approximately 98 percent of school districts met the state criteria, he said.
"Everyone's bullying plan is probably a little different, probably a little tweaked to their community, but it has to fall in line with the state mandates," Melillo said.
The new legislation, he said, was spurred by several incidents in which young Massachusetts students, most famously 11?year?old Carl Walker?Hoover of Springfield in 2009 and 15?year?old Phoebe Prince of South Hadley last year, committed suicide in response to bullying.
"It was a tragedy," he said. "That brought this to the forefront of the state legislation."
Somerville schools also developed a new reporting system via telephone, offered in four different languages with the option of anonymity, Melillo said.
When the school receives a report, usually through a teacher, the school's principal initiates an investigation to determine whether or not the incident constituted bullying, Melillo said.
"The principal would make a determination on whether bullying occurred or did not occur," Melillo said.
Proactive action, Melillo said, was necessary to eliminate bullying.
"We've been pretty proactive about this," Melillo said. "We want to eliminate bullying from the Somerville schools."
Though the state bill only applies to primary and secondary schools, Tufts students and faculty in conjunction with Dean of Student Affairs Bruce Reitman have since November been working on a task force examining cyber bullying on campus.
"We're trying to look at what the legislation's been doing and trying to move on that process," task force member Tabias Wilson, a sophomore, said.
Wilson said the state legislation sets a good example for Tufts to take similar action against bullying, especially that conducted over the Internet.
The task force's goal this semester is to initiate discussion and form ideas about how Tufts can improve the student and university approaches to cyber bullying, he said. He said the members of the task force are in a "thinking phase" until the end of the school year.
"We want to use this task force ... to examine Tufts' culture and how healthy the culture is," Wilson said. "[There's] very little discussion in an organized way about how to deal with the problem of cyber bullying in part at a college level."
Tufts Community Union President Sam Wallis, a senior, said he does not prefer the term "bullying," since the act is more far?reaching than the term suggests.
"It is a lot broader than what we've grown up hearing," he said.
Wilson said Tufts' culture fosters online harassment, most notably because of a lack of policy in place that addresses online behavior. He referred to Tufts' policies that should address issues of harassment as "vague."
"We don't have any policy specifically," Wilson said. "There's not a space where [students] can get educated and talk about these things at Tufts."
Wilson said that while he does not advocate legal action against student bullies, the university has the capability to release the IP addresses of students to find the perpetrators of online bullying.
Wallis said he would rather the cyber bullying discussion be a student?initiated effort, rather than a policy coming from the administration.
"I don't think it's necessarily the place of the university to come down with a heavy hand on things or find out IP addresses or go after certain people," Wallis said.
Wilson said websites such as The College Anonymous Confession Board (College ACB) encourage vicious anonymous remarks, as well as online threats. He was unsure whether the First Amendment protects anonymous remarks such as these.
"That's an issue that has not been debated - whether anonymity is covered by the First Amendment," Wilson said. "There really needs to be clarity in that area."
