“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” Maybe it’s time to forget that rhyme because we know that bullying and cyber-bullying can be all about words that do hurt and can be cause for great harm and self-harm among our students.

Earlier in May, the school board was presented comparable trend data to assess how our students are doing relative to Policy Governance End 3 (Student Responsibility for Personal Success), which includes how they exhibit positive, ethical behavior and treat one another with respect, courtesy and dignity. The inferences elicited both good dialog and concerns.

First the good news: it takes two to fight and incidents recorded as fighting have gone down significantly. Also good news, assaults (it takes just one perpetrator attacking a victim) resulting in injury have gone down.

The concerns come for the data that showed, in the case of bullying, less than half the students knew who to report the incidents to and in addition nearly half believed that reporting incidents to an adult or teacher would not result in some form of intervention. Some may argue that this depicts a culture of “don’t snitch.” Some may argue that the explanation that adults tend to do nothing about reported bullying is that the reports are dismissed as not meeting the danger level of “sticks and stones.” Given the consequences, things have to change.

One interesting aspect of the data showed that incidents of assault without bodily harm, when combined with bullying incidents, showed a consistent incident rate over the past few years. I would argue that bullying (takes just one perpetrator targeting a victim) is no different than assault.

I would also argue that because bullying can cause bodily, psychological and self-harm, bullying needs to be treated with seriousness by all students and adults that support them (parents, teachers, coaches, administrators, etc).

All our students should feel safe at school and not knowing who to report bullying, given that nearly half of students believe nothing will be done, could be a great cause for anxiety about their safety from bullying at school. This anxiety can then reflect itself in lost class days through absences and a decline in achievement.

If in fact there is a culture of “don’t snitch,” then that culture needs to be removed and replaced with a culture of “help the helpless.” In that transition, we should lose the mindset that “words can never hurt me,” because they can. I hope in the years ahead we continue to see a drop in fighting and assaults and finally see a drop in bullying and assaults without bodily harm combined.

Hiroshi Eto, board member