The school year may be over, but district officials recently took an in-depth look at how its schools have handled harassment, intimidation and bullying (HIB) incidents within their halls over the last two years.
During its June 25 meeting, the Hillsborough Township Board of Education heard a pair of reports from district Anti-Bullying Coordinator Michael Volpe that focused on the 2016-17 and part of the 2017-18 school years.
“As the anti-bullying coordinator for the district, there are certain reports that I have to report out [to the public] a couple of times a year,” Volpe said.
His first report covered the district’s Student Safety Data System (SSDS), which covered reported and confirmed HIB incidents, as well as “other incidents leading to removal.”
The SSDS is a new system that came in to effect at the beginning of the 2017-18 school year. It replaced both the Electronic Violence and Vandalism Reporting System and the Harassment, Intimidation and Bullying – Investigations, Training and Programs System previously employed by the district.
In addition, all training and programs related to HIB conducted throughout the year in support of anti-bullying measures are also reported to the system.
“The new information that I have in that report is about all incidents,” Volpe said. “The state requires that we cluster them together and the incidents include any violence, vandalism, substances, weapons or confirmed HIBs.”
According to Volpe, the district saw zero incidents in each of its schools except for Hillsborough High School, which had 14 incidents.
Those numbers, however, do not tell the full story, as just Hillsborough Middle School and Triangle Elementary School were the only two buildings without any alleged HIB incidents. Auten Road Intermediate School had the most alleged incidents with three.
Hillsborough High School also had 31 “incidents leading to removal,” while Hillsborough Middle School had four and Auten Road Intermediate School had two.
Though those incidents show up on the report, Volpe said each incident could stem from any number of reasons why a student was removed from school.
“There could be issues with [a student adhering to] our attendance policy,” Volpe said. “I know that when I was a vice principal at the high school, there were other reasons you could be suspended for.”
While this first report focused solely on the first half of the 2017-18 school year, Volpe said a report on the remainder of the year will be made available in the fall.
For his second report to the board, Volpe showed the district’s Self-Assessment for Determining Grades under the Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights. Under state regulations, districts are required to submit assessments from each school’s HIB specialists regarding how their building performed in its anti-bullying efforts.
Each specialist grades their respective building on a number of criteria, including “HIB programs, approaches or other initiatives” and “curriculum and instruction on HIB and related information and skills.”
Volpe said those assessments are submitted at the end of each school year before they are tallied and reviewed by the state. Once the state returns those figures to the district by the following spring, officials have until the end of the school year to present the final scores.
According to the district’s self-assessment, the school’s anti-bullying measures earned 72 points out of a possible 78. Volpe said those scores reflect recent changes in the district’s approach to HIB training.
“It goes without saying that all of our hired staff members are adequately and vigorously trained in harassment, intimidation and bullying,” Volpe said. “What some schools noticed last year was that volunteers, vendors and some schools do things better than others…so we’re making concerted efforts to make sure that everyone involved that comes into our schools gets some kind of training.”
Though those assessments are handled in-house, Volpe said he was confident in their accuracy.
“If the anti-bullying specialists weren’t taking it seriously…we could put down 78s for everybody,” he said. “What we’re really trying to do is take a look at what we’re doing and find out what we can do to improve and move on from there.”