Anti-Bullying Advisory Council Formed for Schools

Joseph Di Salvo, Santa Clara County Board of Education president, has formed an Advisory Committee on Bullying with a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender focus.

“These kids feel like no one really has their back,” Di Salvo says. “They believe their teachers wouldn’t understand, that administration wouldn’t understand. When children deal with sexual orientation at an early age, it’s imperative to allow them to talk it through with an adult.”

Di Salvo, who worked as a principal at Jane Lathrop Stanford Middle School in Palo Alto for 20 years before he came to the county Office of Education, met with various candidates he thought would work best in the new committee and says that John Lindner, a Franklin-McKinley School District board member and Oak Grove School District teacher, was a perfect fit, in part, because he is a gay educator.

“He is the only ‘out’ member of school boards in Santa Clara County that we know of,” Di Salvo says.

 "I think it sounds fabulous," says Chris Dawson, assistant principal at , who started the Gay-Straight Alliance club on campus 10 years ago. She started it after attending a county training on teen suicide prevention.

"Any times a school can actively participate in making school campus a safer, more welcoming environment for kids allows them the opportunity to focus on education and learning." 

In fact, it was several high-profile, bully-related suicides in 2010 that brought this ugly side of campus life to the spotlight.

"We had three, four, five suicides that were bullying-related last year, but it's always fleeting," Di Salvo says. "People talk about it and then it goes away. We, as a county board of education, need to see what this advisory council can do."

At Los Altos High School, school leadership acts very quickly when any evidence of bullying appears, Dawson says. "My experience of kids being bullied on gender issues is extremely light— and I'm very proud of that."

Di Salvo also notes that litigation that costs school district in the millions over lawsuits, like the 1999 Morgan Hill case, can be avoided if parents and educators are made aware of the laws surrounding bullying. There's a new state Assembly bill, proposed Feb. 17, that targets bullying of LGBT students at the college level. Di Salvo also notes that the No. 1 reason students stay home from school is because of bullying, which also translates into a revenue loss connected to daily attendance.

A new state law aimed at cyber-bullies by Sen. Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto) that went into effect this year makes impersonating another person online or via other electronic platforms such as text, with the intent to harm, intimidate, threaten or defraud, a misdemeanor carrying up to one year in jail and $1,000 in fines for first-time offenders. (Assembly Bill 1411). 

"We need to have increased national awareness of the pain that kids experience, especially at that age," says Dawson. "The gay population is absolutely more at risk to be bullied, to self-harm, to commit suicide."

The goal of this new advisory committee is to come up with "outside the box" recommendations for things that the county can do, including the formation of gay/straight alliance clubs on school campuses to help eradicate or at least reduce bullying.

Eventually, it could mean a pilot project even at one of the campuses, Di Salvo says. “I know it’s going to be very controversial, but I think that we need to approach it.”

The committee is due back with recommendations for the board the third Wednesday of April.

Dawson says she looks forward to seeing the recommendations. And she hopes that with three assistant principals, counselors from the Community Health Advisory Council, in-service training for staff and advisories for freshmen, "that a kid will feel that somebody does have their backs."

There are already several programs in place to help curb bullying, including Project Corner Stone, Peace Builders andPBIS, but Di Salvo says more needs to be done.

“Having lived in a school environment most of my life, words do hurt, and the old adage of 'sticks and stones' are just not true and needs to be tossed out the door,” he says. “Words are very hurtful.”

Links to information on the prevention of bullying behavior can be found on the SCCOE Web site homepage.