WISCONSIN RAPIDS, WI — The Wisconsin Rapids school district is working with a couple of police departments on parental accountability anti-bullying laws in response to a national epidemic of bullying. The idea isn’t to make parents of students pay huge fines or throw them in jail, but rather to persuade them to talk to their kids about how they’re treating others and the dreadful toll bullying can take.
Dan Ault, the original architect of the laws now wending through the town councils in Wisconsin Rapids and neighboring Grand Rapids, puts the intent more bluntly:
“This isn’t us telling you now to raise children,” Ault said. “It’s us begging you to raise your children.”
Ault, the police chief in Plover, another nearby town in south-central Wisconsin, convinced his village council to pass parental responsibility laws in 2015. He had done the same in 2014 when he was the police chief in Oconto, Wisconsin. In both cases, the threat of a fine was a powerful weapon and no citations were issued.
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“This isn’t a speeding ticket,” Ault said of the way the ordinances work. When police receive complaints about bullying, the parents get a letter. Their response generally has been, ” ‘I gotta talk about this; I don’t want to pay a fine. We’re going to have a conversation to make sure you’re behaving,’ ” Ault said.
Wisconsin Rapids Public Schools Superintendent Craig Broeren expects similar results from the Wisconsin Rapids and Grand Rapids ordinances, both of which are expected to be on the books by mid-summer. Most students in the district of about 5,100 students live in the two communities, so the proposed ordinances would affect most of the school’s students.
Bullying is no more a problem in his district than it is in any across the nation, Broeren said, and it is “not typically so overt that adults are keenly aware of it.”
Bullying is nothing less than a confounding national crisis, with no easy solutions.
National statistics from No Bully, the nation’s leading anti-bullying advocacy group, show that not only have one in three U.S. students reported being bullied by their peers in the last month, they’re about twice as likely as kids who haven’t been bullied to feel lonely, be unable to sleep at night and to contemplate suicide. About 160,000 students stay home from school every day to avoid bullying. The consequences of bullying can be so severe that Patch has launched a national advocacy reporting project and partnered with No Bully to bring awareness around the topic.
‘Kill Yourself’ Notes Accelerated The Issue
The discussions between the Wisconsin Rapids school district and its two largest municipalities were well underway in February when a middle school student received handwritten notes from some of her classmates telling her she should kill herself.
“It was a tipping point. These conversations were in process, but it sped up the immediacy for me,” said Broeren, who added that as the father of twin boys in girl’s class, “it’s mortifying to see that.”
The situation has been dealt with, Broeren said, noting that privacy laws limit how much he can say. The student is fine and apparently wasn’t fazed by the harassment. She discarded the notes ” ’cause they’re dumb,” her mother told news station WSAW.
But what startled Broeren was that the girl’s mother had no idea before she saw a Facebook post showing some of the notes that her daughter had been receiving them for months.
The school superintendent doesn’t think that’s unusual, which could make the proposed ordinances in Wisconsin Rapids and Grand Rapids such an effective tool: Legal consequences are a strong enough carrot to force a conversation between parents and their kids.
“It’s another tool we can use to try to eliminate bullying as much as we can from our public schools,” said Grand Rapids Police Chief Mel Pedersen. “The thing that’s unique about this ordinance is that it holds the individuals themselves accountable, but in the case of minors, it also holds the parents responsible, gets them engaged and lets them know if their child is engaging in bullying.
“Maybe sometimes the parents either aren’t aware of it, and it gets them engaged,” Pedersen said, “and if they are aware, it holds them accountable.”
The school is already using the STOPit school safety app, through which students and others can anonymously report issues they feel are threatening. Bullying is addressed in the school curricula, but no single solution is effective on its own, Broeren said.
The twin ordinances could subject parents to a $50 fine on a first offense, but like Ault, Wisconsin Rapids Police Chief Ermin Blevins thinks a letter will be enough of a “a wakeup call for parents [who have] no idea this is occurring” and prompt a change in behavior. Violators of the ordinances wouldn’t face jail time, but by the time costs are assessed, the total amount due could be $313.
“If we could help one kid through this ordinance, I’d be happy. Just one. It’s an insidious thing. It really is.”
Wisconsin Rapids Police Chief Ermin Blevins
The Plover ordinance wasn’t passed in conjunction with the local school district, but Blevins thinks the cooperative approach makes sense because bullying has evolved in the digital age, happening both on and off the school campus.
“Bullying is traditionally a school problem, but in the times we live in now, bullying is 24 hours a day and seven days a week because of social media,” he said. “In my opinion, that has made bullying easier.”
Like Ault, Blevins said the proposed ordinance “is not about issuing citations and fining parents.”
“This is about getting parents involved in extreme cases,” he said. “I look at it as a three-legged stool — the school district, police and parents.
“Bullying is a real problem for kids, and even some adults,” Blevins added. “Some of these kids are going through some real pain. If we could help one kid through this ordinance, I’d be happy. Just one. It’s an insidious thing. It really is.”
‘This Is Kids Killing Themselves; This Is Kids Killing Others’
Ault became passionate about the topic when he was a patrol sergeant for the police department in Rantoul, Illinois. There, his investigation of a cyberbullying case provided a seminal moment.
“A young man who was in seventh or eighth grade — junior-high age — posted a picture of a girl in his class,” Ault recalled. “He had taken her face from some picture, morphed it onto a picture of a nude adult and created a site where other kids could see it.”
It hurt the girl terribly, causing her shame and embarrassment.
“It’s not the playground of yesterday, it’s a virtual playground, and what goes on there can stay on forever.”
Plover Police Chief Dan Ault
“The parents had no idea and were oblivious to what their son had done,” he said. “A lot of parents were out of touch with what their kids had done, and it started me to thinking: It’s not the same as it was for kids 30, 40 and 50 years ago. They’d hear ‘hey four eyes, hey carrot top, hey freckle face’ on the playground in front of 10 other kids, and it’d be over and done with the next day.”
The torrent of meanness today has taken on a harsher, more vitriolic tone that never goes away on the internet, he said.
“It’s not the playground of yesterday, it’s a virtual playground, and what goes on there can stay on forever,” Ault said. “Someone can take a picture off Facebook and come back to a 30-year class reunion and still bully people about it.”
The traditional advice — “stand up to the bully” — is not only ineffective, but can bring on greater harm, Ault said. Bullying today requires a different solution because of links between bullying and school shootings, teen violence, student suicides and student absenteeism, he said.
“What has anyone ever done differently about it? Nothing,” Ault said. “This is kids killing themselves; this is kids killing others; this is kids staying home from school because of fear. Those are three gigantic issues. You have to do something different.”
Children who choose suicide to escape bullying are a small minority of kids for whom taunting is a daily reality, Cyberbullying Research Center Co-Director Sameer Hinduja told Patch in an earlier interview. But enough do make that unfathomable decision to raise alarm with health professionals.
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a 2017 report that bullying and suicide are closely related, and that kids who bully others and their targets are at increased risk to take their lives. The CDC said it is continuing to learn more about the link between bullying and suicide, but can conclude “that involvement in bullying, along with other risk factors, increases the chance that a young person will engage in suicide-related behaviors.”
A growing number of experts say there is a clear link between bullying experiences and the very small minority of students who rise to the level of a school shooter.
“There is certainly a link between bullying and aggression,” Mark R. Leary, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, told Patch last year in an interview about the 2018 Parkland, Florida, school shooting. “If you look at the profiles of the school shooters, many of them have been bullied, certainly not all of them. But virtually all of them have felt ostracized, rejected, on the sidelines of their peer groups, and often that is accompanied by having been bullied when you’re a low-status peripheral kid at school.”
Wisconsin Laws Get Notice Nationally
Ault compares the reluctance of parents to get involved in bullying situations to the dynamic police often encounter when settling neighborhood disputes like barking dogs: They don’t want to get involved out of fear of reprisal.
“Some parents don’t have the inner strength” to confront the parents and “tell their kids to tolerate it, accept it or do things that may not be in their best interests,” but laws on the books “empower parents to call us.”
“We can go talk to them because we have a chip in the game,” Ault said. “It causes a moment of pause for parents who have kids who are teetering on not the best of behavior.
“This so was so powerful, the message came out so powerfully, we talked about it so much, I am certain parents talked about it with their kids,” he said.
After the Plover ordinance was passed, Ault got calls from around the world — from other police agencies and elected officials interested in modeling similar ordinances. Ault even from one from a man who thanked him for addressing bullying in law intended to make Plover safer for children. Being bullied as a child “changed who he became as an adult,” Ault said of the grateful caller.
“I got dozens if not hundreds of calls,” Ault said. “I had no idea it was going to go like this. I did not expect that.”
One of the inquiries about the ordinance came from North Tonawanda, New York, where parents can be fined $250 or sentenced to 15 days in jail if their child bullies another kid two or more times within a 90-day span.
The law, which is tied to North Tonawanda’s curfew ordinance, became effective in October 2017 after the parent of an eighth-grader watched as another student “sucker-punched him right in the face and hit him as hard as he could.”
“What really alarmed me about the situation was the brazen act of violence in front of a parent,” Victoria Cargo, the mother of the boy who was attacked, told ABC News.
“I haven’t heard from anyone, ‘here’s how you solve bullying.’ What are the additional steps we can take to hammer home that we are going to do everything we can to ensure bullying is less of an issue?”
Wisconsin Rapids Superintendent Craig Broeren
The third-degree assault charge against the student was handled in family court, but the incident sparked enough outrage that elected officials passed the anti-bullying law that puts pressure on parents to talk to their kids about their behavior.
“We hope to never need to use this law but it’s there in extreme cases,” North Tonawanda City School District Superintendent Greg Woytila told ABC News at the time. “But we need to do a better job and we are continually trying to do that.”
Broeren, the Wisconsin Rapids superintendent, said schools need every tool available to combat the epidemic of bullying and cyberbullying.
“I haven’t heard from anyone, ‘here’s how you solve bullying,’ ” Broeren said. “What are the additional steps we can take to hammer home that we are going to do everything we can to ensure bullying is less of an issue? We’re going to do as much as we possibly can to intervene.”
Patch’s Paul Scicchitano contributed reporting from Florida.
The Menace Of Bullies: A Patch Series
As part of a national reporting project, Patch has been looking at society’s roles and responsibilities in bullying and a child’s unthinkable decision to end their own life in hopes we might offer solutions that save lives.
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Selected Stories From The Patch Series