The South Orange-Maplewood School District has seen a moderate increase in its self-assessment scores regarding its compliance with the state’s harassment, intimidation and bullying (HIB) law, but there is still much room for improvement.
“Our scores continue to climb … but there is a tremendous amount of work still to be done,” said in-house counsel Phil Stern, who serves as the district’s HIB coordinator, at Monday’s Board of Education meeting.
In a presentation to the board, Stern said the district primarily needed to improve its efforts to make certain “that the letter and spirit of the HIB law is finding its way into [the] curriculum.” Stern said there is still a “tremendous amount of confusion” statewide as to exactly what constitutes harassment, intimidation, and bullying.
See the presentation attached here as a PDF.
“…we cannot train enough, there is never enough time to be spending in each of the schools with all of our staff.”
In addition, scores dropped for three district schools: Jefferson, Marshall and Maplewood Middle School. Stern called this “troubling.”
“Our efforts to eliminate harassment, intimidation and bullying must be relentless,” Stern said in an email to The Village Green. “While we should celebrate our achievements in improving our Anti-Bullying efforts, we should also redouble our commitment to ensure that no student in our District should experience the trauma of being harassed, intimidated or bullied.”
