This is the video Dana Hamrick originally posted to YouTube last Monday about the bullying she endures every day at Truman High School in Taylor, MI.
I know that was hard to watch. It was hard for me to watch. It is so visceral, so painful, hearing Dana describe her situation.
When the video went viral, and it came to the attention of school authorities, they told her to her and her parents to a “take it down.” Now it is back up, and the girl and her parents are making damning accusations regarding the failure of the school’s staff and administration to address the issue of bullying at Truman High School:
“Please understand how your words how I feel?” Hamrick says in her video. “How your words affect people.
“I am sitting here, bawling my eyes out and you tell me to get out of your sight.”
The 16-year-old Taylor Truman High School student says she gets bullied daily and when she tries to tell school staff, she says they don’t take it seriously.
In the video, Hamrick says she has to hide from students during lunch hour because the bullying is so bad.
“One of the vice principals, he would threaten to suspend me for three days because I wasn’t in the cafeteria … getting bullied,” she said.
The school came out with the standard, “we tried to help her, but she refused to cooperate so the student is to blame” bullpuckey. Dana and her mother, however, in their interview with a local TV news outlet deny those charges.
But Hamrick’s mother tells FOX 2 that although she and Dana’s father were alerted several months ago of the problem, they say the school only followed up again after Dana’s video was posted.
The 16-year-old says the school asked her to name the bullies, so she let it go because she didn’t want to get hurt.
“People send their kids to school, it should be a safe environment,”Hamrick said. “I don’t think I’m safe. I don’t feel safe.”
Another parent of a Truman student told FOX 2 that when her daughter got a concussion from a fight recorded on cellphone video a year ago, the school didn’t react – even when she says her daughter warned staff of the possibility of an attack beforehand.
Please go watch WJBK’s video report at this link, which includes footage from the student who was concussed, as well as portions of their interview with Dana.
Here’s the link to Truman High School’s website: http://www.taylorschools.net/truman/
Please feel free to send a polite but firm email to the school’s principal, Melissa Skopczynski, at this address – skopczm@taylor.k12.mi.us – and let her know her administration’s response to a bullied child is unacceptable.
○ School is absolutely terrible …
Truman High School is a public high school in Taylor. The principal of Truman High School is Melissa Skopczynski. 1,141 children attend Truman High School and identify mostly as White, non-Hispanic; Hispanic; and Black, non-Hispanic. 68% of the 1,141 students here have subsidized lunches. The ratio of students to teachers at Truman High School is 20:1.
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Bullying doesn’t spring spontaneously from adolescent hormones. If there’s a problem with bullying, there’s a problem with adult society.
I hope adult society decides to be responsible here — preferably by replacing the principal. Once you accuse a bullied student of not cooperating and ask them to take down their youtube videos, sorry, no, you’ve lost any faith a decent community should have in you as an administrator.
Sorry I can’t watch the video. I just can’t anymore. I had to stop with the police-murdering-people videos at some point because there were coming out as often as Law&Order re-runs.
Bullying doesn’t spring spontaneously from adolescent hormones.
It’s mostly learned behavior and learned earlier than high school. However, it can thrive among adolescent groups and cliques, and they’re very clever at hiding such behavior from teachers, adults, and parents. Teachers must be astute at picking up nascent forms of bullying such as targeted teasing and extinguishing it before it escalates.
Adolescents do bully, but every time I hear or read about a serious bullying problem in a school, the school administration is enabling it. When I watched the Bully Project documentary a few years ago I was struck by how much the administrators supported the bullies, even on camera – insisting the bullied were just as much as fault, refusing to act even when confronted with evidence of serious misconduct, insisting the target not act to defend themselves, etc. It was really shocking. This school sound very much of a piece with that kind of thing.
Yes, I think I may have overstated my case. Intimidation is part of the human repertoire; but it seems the criteria for intimidation (being gay, being not feminine enough, being not masculine enough, etc.) come straight from society.
I don’t work in schools, so I don’t really know how hard it is to detect, but reading stories about endemic bullying, like curtadams does, I notice the same thing with admistrators enabling bullying.
I think maybe a synthesis of the views are: bullying will always happen, but the nature and extent of it is determined by the adults — whether through negligence or tacit approval. I think one kid covertly bullying one other kid is one thing; but this case is obviously another.
8th grade. A new student midterm. Never an easy situation for the new student or existing class. T was, shall I say, rough around the edges. Soon enough, she was physically sparring with a boy in the hallway. Fortunately (probably mostly for me) I saw it just as a soft punch or two was thrown and stepped in between the would be combatants. Doubt I said more than “fighting is unacceptable” and “get to class.” Being willing to fight gave T creds with the boys.
Not so much with the girls that had likely been chattering amongst themselves for a few weeks before they were spoke loudly in my presence. One asked me if I thought T was a “lesbo.” I shrugged and said that like all of us T would discover who she is as she grows older. Another student objected and said, “But she wears her hair like a boy and wears boy clothes and shoes.” I suggested that it was a style that she likes for now. Then added that it seemed to me that T was hanging out with all the cute boys. T was accepted and fitted in better after that.
Generally, teachers, not administrators, are on the front lines of socialization. What’s so difficult about zero tolerance for hitting other kids?
Have only seen bits of Bully, and while I’m possibly biased, I think middle schools are a terrible idea. Eleven year old kids aren’t emotionally and cognitively developed enough for a school day of multiple classrooms. The transition is a stretch for twelve year old kids that have had the benefit of excellent 5th and 6th grade teachers to move on to Jr. High.
Due to all the cultural/social changes over the past fifty years, effective teaching and school administration has never been more difficult. Yet, in the same period, teaching as a profession has been denigrated and isn’t drawing from the same talent pool it once did, mostly because there are more options open to smarter and better educated women.
I’m not in the school system, but my impression from talking to other parents, from my own son’s disciplinary problems, and from watching Bully, is that the administrators set the culture. For squabbles, teachers can handle it, but for serious, chronic bullying, teachers have to rely on the administrators to back them up and apply discipline. This is especially true in a post-elementary school where each student has 6 or more teachers and no individual teacher can address any chronic interpersonal problem.
I agree that middle school is a bad idea. Even with the junior high model, I had to take my own son out of 7th grade and homeschool him because he couldn’t cope with 7 different classes and teachers.
Definitely need a re-think on schooling structures. At what age are children able to function well when the single, all day classroom becomes two different classes a day? And from two to four and from four to six? Back in my day, the difference between Jr. and Sr. high was that we had one teacher/classroom and two class periods/day for English-History-social studies. That reduced the number of different classes and teachers to six (including gym). Still, it felt overwhelming when I was twelve.
Guess what I attempted to say was that when the structure/system is wrong for kids, they can’t cope and that’s what leads to what is considered misbehavior that is in turn handled with ineffective “discipline.”
Little kids (when their minds are like sponges but not highly organized) today seem to be educationally exposed to too little and required to focus too much on reading/writing and arithmetic. Further compounded by all those wasteful standardized tests. Self-motivation and self-discipline are functions of maturation and learning. That takes time to develop.
Homework is another thing that’s introduced too soon and there’s too much of that as well.
For most kids today 11th and 12th grades are a waste. Not to dismiss the social value of “hanging out with friends” as the reason many of them go to school at all, but if that’s all there is for them, it would be cheaper to give them $10/day and send them off to the malls/parks.
A recent event and observation. Four kids between the ages of seven and nine at an Easter lunch. The dessert table was tucked behind where several adults were seated. The first kid walked by the adults and just as he reached for a cupcake and cookie, one of the adults said, dessert costs a dollar. The kid hesitated for a moment, laughed, and took his dessert.
On being told of the dessert charge, the second kid said, “I don’t think so.” The third kid said, “For real?” and took his dessert after being told that it was a joke. A joke that for the adults was stale by this point.
The last kid (and not the youngest) to go for dessert was told by one of the other kids that it cost a dollar. That made her sad because she didn’t have any money and was unsure if her mother would give her any. The other kid said, “Just joking. Dessert’s free.” She then burst into tears. Sobbing for several minutes. Perplexing the adults and other kids that attempted to comfort her. Finally, she choked out that she hated being tricked.
Bullying is a problem of society and parents who don’t care or have time to educate their kids. Excellent explanation here …
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