School districts prep anti-bullying programs

Richard Tedesco

To New Hyde Park-Garden City Park Superintendent of Schools Robert Katulak, the anti-bullying legislation that the state has required local school districts to implement this year is “one of the better” unfunded mandates. 

But Katulak and other school officials point out the anti-bullying requirements are still an unfunded mandated with uncertain costs at a time when school districts are struggling financially.

Katulak estimated the law will cost the New Hyde Park-Garden City Park school district more than $5,000 for training and implementation of the curricula requirements. 

“That doesn’t even take into account manpower time,” Katulak added.  

The Dignity for All Students Act, which took effect July 1, expands the definition of bullying to protect students from harassment based on “race, color, weight, national origin, ethnic group, religion, religious practice, disability, sexual orientation, gender, and sex. The act requires training for school employees at a time that school districts are the implementing the new Annual Professional Performance Review, a second state mandate that school districts say is pressing their budgets.

Anti-bullying will be part of the orientation process in all four of the New Hyde Park-Garden City Park schools this fall, Katulak said. 

Deirdre Hayes, assistant superintendent for instruction for the Herricks School District said she estimates the cost of training employees at $1,000 for one day. Training for coordinators for each of the five district schools at a cost of less than $1,000 took place in the spring.

“The cost of it right now is the cost of training,” Hayes said.

Additional costs include developing course instruction on bullying for students. 

“I don’t think it’s going to be a super-expensive mandate,” Mineola Superintendent of Schools Michael Nagler said of the anti-bullying mandate. “The cost is not so much the training as it is the curricula side of it.”

Nagler said school districts also must develop methods to assess the curricula they develop. The cost is difficult to determine because it includes estimating the time it will take school districts to train two designated anti-bullying administrators in each school building.

“We have a lot of things in place already,” Nagler said.

School district officials said they welcome the policy, despite their concern about the costs.

“We’re very excited to have a policy in place to prevent bullying,” said Mark Kamberg, president of the East Williston Board of Education.

But he said the training and data entry costs of the program are as yet not entirely determined.

Lorna Lewis, East Williston Superintendent of Schools said training in the district has been budgeted for $2,000. 

“It is not a costly initiative and it brings the issue of bullying to the forefront,” Lewis said.

In the Sewanhaka Central High School District, a large part of the cost is also training costs for 10 administrators in the district’s five buildings, according to Ralph Ferrie, Sewanhaka superintendent of schools.

“There’s going to be a cost. When you look at resources, you have to look at time,” he said.

But as school districts implement the necessary training and instruction for teachers, administrators and students, the anti-bullying policy remains in some flux on the state level.

“Like APPR and everything else coming onto the scene, it’s a big mess,” said Douglas Libby, attorney for the Sewanhaka Central High School District, at a Sewanhaka School Board meeting.

He said new categories of bullying behavior, including harassment based on a student’s weight, were prompting new state standards of behavior related to those categories.

The latest anti-bullying development is the cyber-bullying law. In 2011, a survey of New York students showed that nearly 18 percent were bullied on school property and 16 percent were cyber-bullied through e-mail, chat rooms, instant messaging, Web sites, texting and other electronic means.

“Whether it be e-mails or other forms of messaging, this new cyber-age has brought about an almost 24/7 access to bullying and other abusive measures,” said state Sen. Jack Martins, who played a role in pushing the legislation for passage.

The law requires that schools take action against instances of cyber-bullying both in and out of school. Schools are responsible for intervening against cyber-bullying when it creates or threatens to create a substantial risk to the school environment, substantially interferes with a student’s educational performance or mental, emotional or physical well being, or causes a student to fear for his or her physical safety.

The law that created the template for the Dignity for All Students Act and the cyber-bullying law is the Dignity Act, which was signed into law in 2010 by then-Gov. David Paterson. 

 Last week, Gov. Andrew Cuomo expanded the states’ definition of bullying with by signing state legislation that sets standards for addressing online bullying, dubbed “cyber-bullying.” 

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