Holding anti-bullying assemblies at middle and high schools is certainly a noble effort to try and turn the tide of harassment in the classroom. Whether that harassment is based on race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression or more, schools should be looking at ways to make combating bullying a central part of the education experience.
But if a school holds an anti-bullying assembly, and the students do nothing more than just laugh it off or make jokes about it, does it have any real teeth?
That’s a question that has particular relevance today, with the word that a 14-year-old Pennsylvania student committed suicide by throwing himself in front of a tractor trailer to escape bullying at his school. The day before his suicide, the school had held an anti-bullying assembly, but as The Daily Item reports in their coverage of the suicide, many students just laughed the program off and wasted the opportunity to really look at the consequences of bullying.
And now another student is dead.
Budget crises rarely result in productive policy reforms, but criminal justice may be the exception that proves the rule. Pennsylvania is now jumping on the 