Anti-Bullying Advisory Council Formed

Joseph Di Salvo, Santa Clara County Office of Education Board of Education president, has formed an Advisory Committee on Bullying with a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender focus.

“These kids feel like no one really has their back,” Di Salvo says. “They believe their teachers wouldn’t understand, that administration wouldn’t understand. When children deal with sexual orientation at an early age, it’s imperative to allow them to talk it through with an adult.”

Di Salvo, who worked as a principal at Jane Lathrop Stanford Middle School in Palo Alto for 20 years, met with various people he thought would work best in the new committee and says that John Lindner, a Franklin-McKinley School District board member and Oak Grove School District teacher, was a perfect fit.

“He is the only ‘out’ member of school boards in Santa Clara County that we know of,” Di Salvo says. “He’s a gay educator.”

The goal of this new advisory committee is to come up with "outside the box" recommendations for things that the county can do, including the formation of gay/straight alliance clubs on school campuses to help eradicate or at least reduce bullying.

“I think that eventually, it could mean for professional development, a pilot project even at one of the campuses,” Di Salvo says. “I know it’s going to be very controversial, but I think that we need to approach it.”

Several high-profile, bully-related suicides in 2010 brought this ugly side of campus life to the spotlight.

"We had three, four, five suicides that were bullying-related last year, but it's always fleeting," Di Salvo says. "People talk about it and then it goes away. We, as a county board of education, need to see what this advisory counsel can do."

There are already several programs in place to help curb bullying, including Project Corner Stone, Peace Builders andPBIS, but Di Salvo says more needs to be done.

"Just to have environments free of this kind of bias and prejudice and hateful and hurtful behavior is important," he says.

Di Salvo also notes that litigation that costs school district in the millions over lawsuits, like the 1999 Morgan Hill case, can be avoided if parents and educators are made aware of the laws surrounding bullying. There's a new bill proposed Feb. 17 that targets bullying of LGBT students at the college level. He also notes that the No. 1 reason for students staying home from school is bullying, which also translates into a revenue loss connected to daily attendance.

“Having lived in a school environment most of my life, words do hurt, and the old adage of 'sticks and stones' are just not true and needs to be tossed out the door,” he says. “Words are very hurtful.”

The committee is due to go back to the board with recommendations the third Wednesday of April.

Links to information on the prevention of bullying behavior can be found on the SCCOE website homepage.