Bullying Program

A new bullying program has been implemented at some area schools. The school board of Anywhere High School would like to have this program assessed to evaluate its effectiveness. The schools that have utilized the program ideally should have collected data in their own schools to help measure the situations surrounding bullying. Of course much of this data will be subjective, but the measurement actually is measuring the perception of the students, faulty and support staff related to the incidents of bullying. Then they would have implemented their program for the intervention with the goal to decrease the bullying. After a school wide bullying intervention has taken place than a re-measurement or also known as an evaluation should take place. The results for the pre program should be contrasted with the post program. If the incidents of bullying are drastically decreased or the severity of the bullying has been decreased to a predetermined level of effectiveness than I could than recommend the implementation of the intervention. This is an interesting question actually because my high school that I graduated from just did a similar process. Three years ago they took a school wide professional questionnaire asking students to rate bullying incidents. They did an educational program that included 12 hours interspersed through out the school year educating about what bullying is, what maybe factors that influence it and where to go for help to manage it. The program did not seem to really have an effect so they hired Rachael’s Challenge professional team to come to the school for an all day workshop about Columbine. The previous survey was again given after the program. The Rachael’s Challenge workshop did not seem to have much of an impact. It is noted in the literature that the largest group of bullying occurs at a junior high level so anti-bullying approaches through discipline is now being utilized to try and curb this phenomena.

Something that might be more effective would be to set up in the school a CISD program. CISD stands for the critical incident stress debriefing. This program brings people together after a traumatic event to talk it out to prevent post traumatic stress disorder. The students in the schools could be split up into groups based on grade level and then they would talk about their experiences with bullying. After the discussions evaluations could be distributed to the students. After the program was over the teachers, faculty and psychologists would evaluate the student responses to see how they liked the program and if they thought the program would be effective. A few weeks later the psychologists would return to evaluate the students to see if the bullying was reduced or eliminated.