Bully For You

I suspect that I really have two completely separate commentaries to deliver, but they are intricatley related to one another, so I have opted to post them one after the other.

I am furious with the local newspaper, which has decided to cover a recent teen suicide in as irresponsible a manner as one can imagine. Grieving parents in the school district in which I reside have lost a beautiful young son, 17. He left no note when he took his life, so the parents -understandably - are searching despertely for an answer that will explain the cause of such a tragic decision. The parents are suspicious that bullying, on-line and in school, drove their son to make the gut-wrenching choice to take his own life.

I feel so bad for the parents. Why, the mother asked in print, did she have to lose her little boy? She doesn't know. I don't know. The newspaper doesn't know. Absent a note, or an insight from one of the boy's friends, or a school official - teacher, administrator, counselor - we may never have an answer to that question.

So the cause of my fury is the newspaper's decision to run with the story and to hypothesize that bullying could have been the cause. No one seems to have any evidence that harassment has been taking place, but the country has had some high profile cases the past few years, and bullying was a primary cause in those cases. An investigation being conducted by the police, and I'm sure a similar inspection by school officials, will try to draw some conclusions, but two stories have already run. The theme of each story has been that bullying can drive young people to desperate measures. Of course it can. We already knew that. Did it do so in this case?

When the stories were run, no one involved with the terrible loss of life was ready to attribute the tragedy to bullying. Nevertheless, readers have now been led by the reporter's speculation to reach a conclusion that doesn't exist.

If harassment is determined to be the culprit, then everyone in the community needs to answer a huge number of questions. Why wasn't the problem reported? If it was reported, why didn't the school intervene? If they did intervene, why weren't the efforts to stop the harrrassment effective?

Here's my major beef: what if bullying or harrassment had nothing to do with the boy's belief that the only remedy for his despair was his own death? What if the investigation by police and school district yields evidence of a different catalyst? Unfortunately, young people commit suicide for a large number of reasons, including bullying. If the cause was something else, the community has been wasting time. Already, a local organization is taking the district to task for what they have prematurely decided is an attempt to 'sweep the situation under the rug.' The angle of the story leads community members to mistrust the people who run the schools, undermining its efforts to make sure that students are safe.

My guess is that students, at least some of them, are more afraid than they would otherwise be. Teachers, support staff, and administrators are likewise more highly stressed. What good then will the decision to run the story, with a bullying angle, have been?

I realize that I run a risk here by deflecting attention away from the tragic events and the overwhelming pain that the family and friends are experiencing. I am not callous or unfeeling, but I am perplexed and incensed at the senselessness of the local paper. For crying out loud, find out if the bullying angle has any weight. If it does, trumpet your disappointment and indignation as stridently as you wish. But realize the damage you are doing when you imply two schools - the home school and the tech school - have been blind, deaf, dumb, and duplicitous.