Verbal, race-based harassment is up in this Pierce County school district
For months, parents have been coming forward to the Peninsula School District board with stories about their kids being bullied and harassed.
One dad said another student threatened and punched his daughter in elementary school. A mom said her son was called slurs after he came out as LGBTQ in his middle school. And concerned parents, who accused the district of ignoring what they say is a pattern, formed an advocacy group called Moms for P.E.A.C.E. Representatives spoke at many board meetings over the last two years.
On Tuesday, district staff presented the school board with a long-anticipated report to get to the heart of the issue: what's not working?
The complex answer to that question wasn't immediately clear from the presentation, which provided general recommendations for the district to improve their prevention and response to harassment, intimidation and bullying incidents. It found that certain types of incidents have increased in recent years, such as race/ethnicity/nationality-based incidents, but didn't explain how the numbers stack up against other districts or national trends.
The report didn't provide measurable goals to tackle the problem, but district officials told the board they will make a plan before next school year. Led by district staff in partnership with Puget Sound Educational Service District, the report was supposed to audit existing school policies, practices and procedures and identify recommendations for change over the long-term, according to Chief of Schools Michael Farmer when he introduced the review at a board meeting in September.
Presented by Farmer, Deputy Chief of Schools Julie Schultz-Bartlett and district paralegal and HIB (Harassment, Intimidation and Bullying) Compliance Officer Shelby Morng, the presentation lasted about one and a half hours and covered a slew of areas that staff and members of a separate task force examined to try to find answers: district policies and procedures, reporting and investigation processes and systems, student feedback on school culture and staff support, and more.
At the meeting Tuesday, three people spoke during public comment about the presentation. All three said they wanted to see more action from the district to address the issue. One of them was Jud Morris, who said he has worked and volunteered in the school district for the last 20 years.
'I thought about (the) meeting after I left and see one of the issues to be how does PSD connect pain families feel from (harassment, intimidation and bullying) with implementation of effective policies/procedures to stop HIB,' Morris wrote in an email to The News Tribune the next day. 'That's the challenge.'
A copy of the full report will be available on the district's new harassment, intimidation and bullying website, Farmer told the board Tuesday.
A chart in the presentation showed that reported verbal incidents of harassment, intimidation and bullying took up a larger percentage of total incidents in 2023-2024 than in previous years.
Verbal incidents took up 72.16% of total incidents in 2023-2024, up from 60.8% in 2022-2023; 68.69% in 2021-2022; and 45.83% in 2018-2019, according to the chart. Physical incidents decreased, from 47.92% in 2018-2019 to 25.77% in 2023-2024. The data skipped over the years impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The district has previously said publicly that harassment, intimidation and bullying incidents as a whole have increased in recent years. At the March 2024 study session, a district staff member told the board that the number of incidents at the elementary level recorded in PowerSchool, a cloud-based K-12 software provider, increased from 14 incidents in 2018-2019 to 51 in 2022-2023. At the secondary school level, the number went from 24 recorded incidents in 2018-2019 to 53 incidents in 2021-2022, the staff member told the board.
Data from the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction shows that enrollment numbers were similar in 2018-2019 and 2023-2024 in the Peninsula School District at about 9,000 students.
Another chart in Tuesday's presentation showed that harassment, intimidation and bullying incidents related to race, ethnicity, or nationality are also on the rise as a proportion of total incidents reported. Race/ethnicity/nationality-related incidents increased from 11.93% in 2022-2023 to 29.9% in 2023-2024.
The presentation recommended that the district look to districts, including the Bellevue, Snoqualmie Valley and Vancouver School Districts, to emulate their systems and policies.
Deputy Chief of Schools Julie Schultz-Bartlett told the board the district's Bullying Action and Prevention Task Force, which she headed, found a gap in curriculum educating students about discriminatory harassment. Students are already learning from curricula like Second Step and CharacterStrong, which teach students life skills and address bullying, but the district lacks training around racial language, homophobic language and identity-based harassment, according to Schultz-Bartlett.
There's now a central location on the district's website for information about harassment, intimidation and bullying, as well as where to report concerns, through the efforts of the Bullying Action and Prevention Task Force.
'One of the pieces that we heard repeatedly from family and community members was that they don't know how to report when something has happened,' Schultz-Bartlet told the board. 'So we've made two pages.'
The harassment, intimidation and bullying page, psd401.net/hib, explains definitions, how to report an incident, the district's prevention efforts, and related policies. It also features buttons to report a concern directly to school administrators or to the state-sponsored platform, HearMeWA.
Another page, psd401.net/report, can be found under 'Report a Concern' from the district's Quick Links tab on the homepage. That page also features buttons to report a concern or tip, as well as a dropdown list showing who to contact for specific topics including school-related concerns, disability discrimination, sexual harassment and other issues.
The Bullying Action and Prevention Task Force met five times over six months for a total of about 10 hours in-person, and examined a variety of materials including student handbooks, social and emotional learning curricula, school board procedures and more to identify gaps in the district's anti-bullying strategies, Schultz-Bartlett said at the meeting.
One of their exercises included looking at write-ups of real student behavior incidents requiring discipline and categorizing them as harassment, intimidation and bullying or something else, such as inappropriate conduct or violence. All the incidents were inappropriate, but the task force decided some that staff may have deemed harassment, intimidation or bullying didn't actually fit into that category, according to Schultz-Bartlett.
The district's Policy 3207 defines harassment, intimidation and bullying as any intentional act that 'physically harms a student or damages the student's property,' 'has the effect of substantially interfering with a student's education,' 'is so severe, persistent, or pervasive that it creates an intimidating or threatening educational environment,' or 'has the effect of substantially disrupting the orderly operation of the school.'
'We know transparency is important, but we also experienced it ourselves how hard it is to categorize some of these activities that we're seeing,' Schultz-Bartlett said.
Asked by board member Jennifer Butler to speak to the challenges of coding incidents more consistently, Schultz-Bartlett said that the district's principals and assistant principals are already working on aligning their schools' student handbooks to consistently decide what types of behavior fall under which categories. That work will likely continue through next year, she said.
Responding to a question from board President Natalie Wimberly, Schultz-Bartlett said the task force hasn't set any measurable goals to target the issues studied at this point.
'Mostly we set forward actions that we wanted to take with the goal that we would decrease overall (harassment, intimidation and bullying) incidents within our buildings and increase our sense of belonging,' Schultz-Bartlett said.
She added that existing data for tracking bullying-related incidents 'is not very clean,' in part because the district recently switched data collection systems. Now that the district is using Navigate360 to track incidents, they'll have some benchmark data later this year that they can use to identify metrics to track, she said.
The district superintendent and cabinet will review the report and recommendations and make a plan for 2025-2026 and beyond, Farmer said near the end of the presentation. He also said focus groups with students, school principals' work to streamline discipline processes and monitoring the effectiveness of staff training and professional development will continue.
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