Only four local students took advantage last year of the B.C. government’s new online system for reporting bullying.
The website went live in November as part of the ERASE Bullying Strategy and allows students anywhere to make anonymous reports that are sent to local administrators for action.
Don MacIntyre, the safe schools co-ordinator for the Okanagan Skaha School District, said all four reports he received contained third-hand information that was found to be inaccurate.
One of the incidents, he said, related to an argument that was overheard at a party.
“As it turned out, it was just a disagreement between two kids, so perception has a lot to do with the way kids would report,” MacIntyre said.
Other reports concerned students being intimidated by someone.
“Once again, it’s all third-hand information, not something that somebody saw themselves,” he said. “And by the time it works its way through that kind of a process, there’s obviously elements of that conversation that have been either over-emphasized or under-emphasized.”
MacIntyre, also the district’s director of instruction, said bullying is typically dealt with at schools before an online report is filed because most students are comfortable taking problems directly to staff members.
“That’s been my personal experience, and I think as long as kids think they have a voice, they’re going to use it. In my work in schools, I constantly had kids coming to me saying, ‘Hey, Mr. Mac, I heard this or I heard that,’ and then I would deal with it.”
It’s still unknown how many reports the new website collected province-wide.
Education Ministry spokesperson Matt Silver said government staff is still working with individual districts to gather, review and classify reports.
The reporting website is one part of the 10-point ERASE Bullying Strategy unveiled a year ago by the B.C. government.
The $2-million program is focused mainly on development of new resources for educating teachers and parents about the issue. Silver said the emphasis this year will be on training 15,000 educators and community partners to identify and prevent threats, and create caring school communities.
MacIntyre said the strategy is building on work individual school districts have already done.
“What it does is it gives us access to the most recent research on how to deal most effectively with these types of circumstances, so for that reason I think it’s highly valuable,” he said.
“I wouldn’t say the vast majority of it is brand new to us. All it’s doing is extending what is already active in our district, but it’s giving us access to what current research says about what’s best practice, and I think that’s always useful.”
