The most bullied children? Special needs. We have to be on guard that our kids are protected and safe.

I know that more work can be done to understand when children need more help than a school is equipped to give. This is a related but separate issue from bullying.

I have had students who set fires; to books taken from the library, to a field near a section of town with many homes, and to the roof of our school. There are other fires that this small group of kids was involved with. One of them set his house on fire. Gutted.

I have a student who has very difficult language problems. Great difficulty processing language, yet intelligent. This student has difficulty reading social cues. This student is also fixated on death, serial killing and suicide. I stayed up an entire night documenting our conversations so that we could move ahead to get him help. The parents are from another culture and do not believe in psychological counseling.

They rejected the psychologist from their culture, who spoke their language; the guidance counselor who spent her time finding this psychologist, found someone else. The other psychologist has said that the child is, at least, depressed and needs help.

The child is back at school and may or may not be getting the help he needs. As I said before, I see this child every day in a small group. I am working with him on his difficulties processing the language. Another teacher works with him on social skills. But I know this child needs more.

Where is the more???? In a few months, he will move on to another grade.

While this child is terribly troubled, he is not the only child about whom we have serious concerns. We have had to have a home visit set up to find out why a child was missing over 20% of the school year. His only guardian has addiction problems and the home is not really a home. We feed him breakfast and lunch. He barely does a thing at school. We have let him be with us most of the school day to try and help him do a little schoolwork. We are kind and he has said it’s his best year of his life. Think about that.

There’s more.

I’ve written before – and never received a response – that special education teachers and their assistants are on the cutting edge of identifying children in need. Many of us are teachers who have chosen this underpaid, understaffed line of work. Now that my son is in college, I am pursuing a math degree. But my seven years in special education is life changing.

You have described a parent’s nightmare. The bullying of children is ugly and children need help.

We recently had another workshop on dealing with bullies, who are both boys and girls. Teachers have to address the bullies, who are often skilled at redirecting the attention and sliding away. Because I work at a middle school, where bullying behavior peaks (according to studies), it is important that we recognize the signs and handle situations well.

If we come upon a bullying situation, we are advised to address the child who is bullying while letting the child on the other end of it move away from the situation. This is because the idea of bringing both kids in at once favors the child who has the bullying skills.

We let the kid who is bullying know that we have seen this behavior, that it is not acceptable in our school, and that we will be watching for this in the future. If the behavior deserves a trip to the principal, we will make that happen. However, we are encouraged to look at smaller situations and let the child know that we have seen what happened.

We follow up with the other child later, privately. If the child needs support, the guidance counselor gets involved for support. Again, this is done privately.

I have worked on excellent teams of teachers where we have shared the situations and been able to stop some of this behavior and re-establish a safe space. We are sensitive to children who begin to miss school and try to keep the school as a safe place for them.

I am sorry that you and your son were not helped.

#46 Phoenix Woman
The “homicidal triad” is a potential sign of sociopathy, a born psychopath, an emotional flatliner.. whatever you want to call it. At Columbine, both Harris and his bullies had some ‘psychopathic’ characteristics. These people play rough, obviously.

#91 Cassius Chaerea
The intelligent sociopath can do quite well in competitive society – cunning and ruthless, yet charming and pragmatic. The down side is that the expertise they have to trade with society involves much more in the way of power politics than any socially useful problem solving. Bush is no Pablo Escobar, but I’d bet he’s cut from much more similar cloth to him than any of the commenters here.

#97 Minnesotachuck
Richard Rhodes sounds like someone who’s temperament craved revenge last (from #191).

#125 Marie Roget
Yup.

#136 RodeoBob
The “angry loner” thing may be symptomatic. They may be hurting for good reason, and they may believe (often with good reason) that nobody cares. In Cho Seung-Hui’s case, a few people did notice but obviously not enough.

#171 cynic
IMO, the red flag list shouldn’t be more than a starting point for further observation, and a kid should never be alerted to having been ‘flagged’ as:
An ‘innocent’ might be genuinely hurt if they found out.
A ‘guilty’ might be alerted that they were being watched.

#178 TomK
So your solution is to punish the parents?

Thanks for letting me play with this serious topic. It’ll be interesting to see if Cho Seung-Hui was developing schizophrenia, got knocked crazy by some traumatic abuse, or was a rare introverted psychopath.

It’s a real drag when revenge is number one.

It is my understanding that it is extremely difficult to impossible to detain a person who is clearly disturbed but resistant to treatment. In this case, the signs that Cho was seriously disturbed were recognised the year before, the police were notified, but they shrugged and said there was nothing they could do. Are there any states that make it easier to intervene?

Too bad we can’t reframe the media debate over what should be done from from more gun control vs. less gun contorl to the less sound-bitey question of how to deliver mental health services to seriously ill people who are treatment resistant especially when there are not enough services to go around as it is.

Thanks for trying to start this conversation. I recently responded, in a professional capacity, to a survey about how to fix No Child Left Behind. My response? Quit punishing those of us who choose to work with these kids and the kids we choose to care about and start working to end poverty, hunger, disease, homelessness, and violence. It’s hard to teach a hungry, sick, sleepy, frightened, abused child how to read. They just want to survive and be loved. Namaste.

I’ll take this opportunity to thank you for what you do. I sometimes think the No Child Left Behind act should be renamed the No Teacher Left Sane act. That’s not to say there were no problems pre-NCLB enactment but I’ve begun to wonder if the cure hasn’t been nearly as bad as the disease.

we desperately need to have a long, detailed national conversation about this. Because we are losing far too many kids that might have a much better chance if we were doing things differently.

Christy, I work with “at-risk” kids (part of why I’ve been so busy that I can’t comment much on FDL any more). Let me just say “THANK YOU!” loudly and clearly for saying what I feel should be very obvious.

Most of the kids that I try to get help for have little chance of receiving anything in the way of medical/psychiatric/counseling care and the family support is simply not there. I do everything in my power and spend nearly every penny I earn to try to give these children a safe, caring place, even if it’s only in my classroom for a few hours a day.

I don’t do it because I believe that I can work miracles; I long ago accepted that I have little impact compared to family influence, dangerous neighborhoods, gangs, drug and alcohol abuse, etc. I’ve only been able to remain in this line of work for so long because I focus on the kids in front of me and let go when they leave me at the end of the school year. I do check up on their progress and some do come back to talk to me and thank me. That’s the true payoff in my line of work.

But I have no illusions. Many end up in jail, some die. I don’t judge them or their families because I don’t have to live their lives and deal with the issues they do every day at home. I do know how horribly difficult it is to break the cycle of poverty and violence and anger and abusiveness and hopelessness.

It is my hope, however naieve, that if one of my little ones finds him or herself in a situation someday, like what happened yesterday, they might stop and think “Hey, my teacher once told me that I am valued, loved, amazing, and worth everything in the world. Maybe I don’t need to do this to act out my hatred and fear.”

Thanks for trying to start this conversation. I recently responded, in a professional capacity, to a survey about how to fix No Child Left Behind. My response? Quit punishing those of us who choose to work with these kids and the kids we choose to care about and start working to end poverty, hunger, disease, homelessness, and violence. It’s hard to teach a hungry, sick, sleepy, frightened, abused child how to read. They just want to survive and be loved. Namaste.