Parents, city leaders face off on bullying
Hearing draws crowd of 200
More than 200 parents and community leaders showed up at a hearing on bullying, many of them pointing fingers at everyone from school administrators to City Council members for not effectively responding.
But before city school officials and the City Council's education committee heard testimony from the crowd, they made sure that parents didn't neglect to point a finger at themselves when it came to student behavior.
"This was not intended as a beat-up on the Baltimore City school system," City Council President Bernard C. "Jack" Young told parents at the meeting he called Wednesday night. "This was to figure out how to help the school system."
Young called on schools CEO Andrés Alonso and other school officials to address bullying and hear parent testimony after an April incident at Gilmor Elementary school in which a parent of a third-grader said her daughter threatened to kill herself and attempted to jump out of a window to escape bullies at Gilmor Elementary School. City school officials said the girl's teacher reported that the student only said she wanted to commit suicide.
Alonso held steadfast Wednesday to his initial response to the incident, that suspension — often the most desired response to bullying — was not the answer to combating bullying. He provided data that showed the schools system's suspension rate has dropped by more than half since 2004, which he correlated to an equally declining dropout rate.
"If you push them out of school, you push them to consequences in the future," Alonso said. "We are convinced that the outcomes are showing that the bottom line is that if we are keeping kids in school, we are successful," he
