A Look at Florida Bully Law
Ken Edelstein writes a good article on the new Florida bullying law and I agree it could use a bit more work.
A Florida law praised nationally as a landmark step against bullying is falling far short in its most basic of goals: To get schools to report bullying incidents.
The Jeffrey Johnston Stand Up for All Students Act does a lot more than simply encourage schools to report bullying. It also requires local school districts to adopt policies against both in-person bullying and cyber-bullying, or else to risk the loss of state funding.
But data from the Florida Department of Education shows that schools recorded barely 6,000 incidents of bullying last year — far fewer than experts say are likely to have occurred among the state’s 2.6 million students.
That’s a tiny fraction of the number of incidents likely to have occurred. According to the U.S. Department of Education, some 13 million are bullied annually in the nation.
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