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Bill Proposes Bullied Students Change Schools
There’s a new proposed bill making waves in the Florida House of Representatives, which suggests that public school children get the option to change schools if they’re being bullied – this includes the option of going to private school which the state will fund.
“I feel like instead of normalizing bullying, which feels like this is what is the purpose of doing something like it, why don’t they use those funds to really stop bullying in school?” said Johanna Castillo, who has two children in elementary school.
The statistics in the period of 2015 and 2016 from Florida Department of Education’s School Environmental Safety Incident Reporting System show that nearly 47,000 public school students in the state declare that they were bullied in various ways.
Creating the Hope Scholarship Program, House Bill 1 helps bullied children, by giving them vouchers to go to another school.
One Palm Beach County mother athinks this is a great idea because her own daughter has to change middle schools after being bullied.
(Picture from bedfordviewedenvalenews.co.za)
However, some say this approach cannot eliminate the problem from the root.
“I don’t think I’m really on board with that bill,” Castillo said. “I would prefer for them to go to those schools that have a lot of systematic bullying and really implement something that will help all the students. Not just one student.”
Lawyer Bill Bone says the program ‘Do the Right Thing,’ has directly addressed bullying in Palm Beach County public schools.
“This year alone over 30,000 middle school students will write an essay on the subject of violence, which includes bullying and other kinds of violence that are even worse,” he said.
Bone said this bill’s proposed program will cost the state quite a penny.
“Through legislation to tell a parent that the solution is to take the child out of the school is in my opinion, not the remedy,” he said. “It’s what we’re doing now. It’s programming like Do the Right Thing and other anti-bullying programs that the school does.”
He said that teachers and school administrators paid close attention to the fight against bullying, which “Does the Write Thing” helps with by allowing the students to write about their experiences.
“They express those feelings to the teacher and the teacher then is empowered to do something about it, refer them to social services, address the problem on the spot,” Bone said. “That’s the way it should be done, from the ground up. Not the legislature telling us that you get to take your kid out of school and put him into a private school or put him into another school and run away.”
The bill has made it through the House’s Pre K-12 Innovation Subcommittee with nine votes in favor of the bill and five votes against it, but it still has several more steps to go through before becoming law.
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