Batavia school board adopts new anti-bullying policies

To address student concerns, Batavia Public School District 101 recently updated bullying policies to better align the District with new state standards. However, at least one board member argues the changes aren’t enough for immediate action.

The changes include stronger language to show bullying, intimidation, and harassment will not be tolerated. It also updates when parents/guardians of students involved in incidents will be notified and what services will be provided to them. As part of Superintendent Tom Kim’s strategic plan to mitigate bullying, the board is collecting and monitoring bullying incident data to assess trends and see where policies can best be amended. Incidents will be displayed on a public online dashboard, with ongoing debates how to share information without potentially bringing harmful attention to the students involved in incidents.

During the Sept. 17 board meeting, board member Danielle Sligar said, that while the data will be nice to highlight areas needing focus, the process is incredibly lengthy and does not provide the policy changes students need.

“Right now, we have not changed anything specific to our district besides talking about the data dashboard,” Sligar said. “There’s really nothing different that’s going to happen for our kids at school. It’s our job to make sure we’ve heard things, but I don’t think any of our changes are necessarily addressing them at this moment. We’re not doing policy, so what are we doing?”

Board member Rob Arulandu said the flow chart and data dashboard is the best way to examine trends to see how policies are working. He argued they do not have the data to best direct them in strategizing and implementing new policy.

“We’re going to reserve the right to learn, get smarter, get feedback, and keep improving the heck out of this policy and subsequent procedures that come out of it,” Arulandu said. “We have to start here, and let’s continue with the discussions as needed.”

Board Vice President Aaron Kilburg said he believes every single person in the room is against bullying and will do everything in their power to ensure students feel safe and a sense of belonging on campus.

“Every quarter we’re going to review the data, so at a minimum, every 90 days, Tom [Kim] is going to make a presentation, and if the data is not trending in the right direction, we’re going to hold him accountable,” said Kilburg during the meeting.

Board President Craig Meadows said if the Board sees any glaring, obvious points from Kim’s presented data, they will tell Kim what areas his team needs to address. Meadows said it is then up to Kim to be the one who tells the Board what they’re going to do about it.

Sligar told the board she has hit nothing but barriers from them in trying to create actual policies to address students’ current concerns. She said she’s concerned the collected data will not tell the full story because so many students have already shared their hesitations preventing them from coming forward and reporting incidents.

“We’ve been told kids are not reporting things because they didn’t receive a good interaction, or they didn’t feel it was responded to in a safe way,” Sligar said. “Do we make sure procedurally, we have a safe person going with every student, whether it’s a teacher, or whoever it may be? Right now we know of cases where the kids did not have a safe person.”

“I don’t feel like anything I have accomplished has changed any of these kids’ lives or has any influence on that,” Sligar said. “I do have hope going forward, but we’ve seen this before.”

As part of the changes adopted in the bullying policy’s prevention and response plan, notifications to parents and guardians will now occur within 24 hours of when administrators learn of the student’s involvement in the incident.

To comply with new state standards, the District is required to collect data regarding verified allegations of bullying and submit an annual report to the Illinois State Board of Education every August.