'Talking To A Wall': How NYC Schools Failed Bullied Kids

NEW YORK — Bobbi Jo Gonzalez’s son and daughter have never known a school without bullies. A group of kids started tormenting her son, now 13, when he was in first grade at P.S. 97Q in Woodhaven, Queens. They would call him “cancer boy” whenever he got his hair cut short and threatened to physically hurt him.

“Sometimes they were nice, but they wanted me to let my guard down so that way they could take advantage of it,” said the boy, whose name Patch is not publishing to protect his privacy. “Since then, I never have.”

School staff apparently tried to wrangle one of the bullies with detention, but that didn’t stop them. Gonzalez said she felt “brushed off” by the school’s principal when she raised concerns.

“She just completely ignored the whole situation,” the Woodhaven mom said.

The teen’s story is one of hundreds of examples of unchecked bullying that causes millions of students to stay home from school every day. Patch is taking a yearlong look at this confounding national crisis with a goal of providing parents like Gonzalez the tools they need to help their children navigate these horrible situations, which affect as many as one in three middle and high school students.

Gonzalez is one of three New York City parents who described to Patch how their kids endured bullying for months or years amid uneven responses from school staff.

The parents said they felt dismissed when they reported behavior that harmed their children. In one case, a principal waited more than a month to report that a kid had threatened suicide, according to a parent and city records.

The Department of Education said it is investigating the cases in which schools did not take appropriate action and “will ensure necessary disciplinary action is taken.”

“Schools are required to treat any allegation of bullying with the utmost seriousness, including immediately reporting and thoroughly investigating each incident, and anything less than that is unacceptable,” DOE spokeswoman Miranda Barbot said in a statement.

But the parents that spoke to Patch aren’t alone. A “pervasive” failure to remedy bullying in schools across the city led to a class-action lawsuit against the DOE in 2016.

“The problems were acute,” said Jim Walden, a lawyer who represented the plaintiff parents and interviewed dozens of parents and students during his work on the case.

“They ranged from simply ignoring the complaint, sometimes blaming the victim, sometimes retaliating against parents whom they believed were squeaky wheels."

School staff sometimes fail to nip bullying in the bud, minimizing small incidents that grow into more harmful patterns of behavior, said Dawn Yuster of Advocates for Children of New York, an education advocacy group. And even though kids may be suspended or otherwise punished, the schools sometimes don’t do enough to address the problem, Yuster said.

“A lot of times principals and schools don’t really know what to do to stop it,” said Yuster, the director of AFC’s School Justice Project. “… They will try different things but they’re not effective and they don’t really know the best strategies to use to address it.”

The DOE has touted its efforts to tackle bullying and give training to staff. The department last fall pledged to spend $8 million on anti-bullying initiatives after a Bronx high schooler who was reportedly bullied stabbed two of his classmates, killing one of them.

The DOE also agreed to investigate bullying more promptly and track it more closely in a settlement to Walden’s federal lawsuit filed this March. Parents have options for reporting bullying beyond going directly to the school, the department said, including an online form that was launched in April.

“We recognize the deep impact bullying can have on the emotional and academic well-being of our students, and it has absolutely no place in our schools,” Barbot said.

But the problem has persisted. More than 8 in 10 sixth- through 12th-graders reported that bullying happened in their schools last year, an all-time high rate, according to a city comptroller’s report published in June.

School staff get annual training on the DOE’s anti-bullying policies and procedures, the department said. That includes entering allegations into the DOE’s central tracking system within 24 hours; conducting an investigation within five school days; and determining the appropriate follow-up for the involved students.

The city puts $47 million a year toward “school climate” initiatives and mental health support, including hiring 100 consultants that lack on-site mental health services, the DOE said.

The department also touted its Respect for All initiative, through which students are provided information about bullying at the start of each school year. Every school also has posters with contact information for its Respect for All liaison, who handles bullying reports, the DOE said.

“We are making investments that foster safe and supportive environments in our schools, and remain laser-focused on this work,” Barbot said.

But the amount of resources the DOE has put toward fighting bullying is “woefully deficient,” Yuster said, often leaving staff unequipped to recognize and address it.

And the department’s broken system seemed to extend more protection to the students who bully than to their targets, Walden said, leaving parents angry and frustrated while their kids were left with emotional scars.

“Some of these kids were still torn up. They felt as though they were marked,” Walden said. “They felt completely helpless and hopeless.”

‘I Was Like The Enemy’

A student saying he wants to take his own life should be enough to spark immediate action. But Renee Di Re says it wasn’t enough when it came to her son.

The boy first said he wanted to suffocate himself in his third-grade classroom at PS/IS 266 on Feb. 7, 2017, his mom said. But the guidance counselor who was in the room never reported it as DOE regulations require.

The principal heard the boy, then 8, make a similar threat the next day but didn’t file a report about the incident for more than a month, according to Di Re and DOE records she shared with Patch.

Di Re’s son, a special education student, had struggled with bullying since the previous fall. He’s heavy-set and tall for his age, his mom said, so he’d get teased because he’s not very fast or athletic. One day he found a note in his chair with a blunt message: “You’re dumb.”

“He’d come home agitated, wouldn’t want to do homework, would rip up his papers from school, wanted no part of any extracurricular activities in the school,” she said. “He just wanted nothing to do with school work or school.”

The boy’s parents noticed his mood change around Halloween, and he revealed what was dealing with a few weeks later, Di Re said.

But teachers shrugged off or ignored the bullying when it was brought to their attention, she said. When the boy brought the note in his chair to one teacher, she “didn’t even look at it, just put it away,” his mother said.

When he asked for his seat to be moved in music class because another kid was bothering him, the teacher told him to “get along,” according to Di Re.

The official account is that the boy handed the folded-up Post-It note to the teacher at the end of the day. The teacher met with his parent and gave a group lesson that discussed with the kids how notes can make someone feel good or bad.

In the music class, the teacher tried working with the group Di Re’s son was in but ultimately changed his seat, according to DOE records and Di Re.

The school’s principal, Christina Catalano, didn’t report the suicide threat until March 21, more than a month after it happened, records show. That was the day after Di Re said she met with a parent support group about the matter. The principal or another designated staffer should have reported it within one school day under one of the DOE’s Chancellor’s Regulations.

Catalano resigned in August 2017, according to the DOE. Allegations against the other staff involved were unsubstantiated, Di Re said. The guidance counselor denied ever hearing the boy make the initial suicide threat in the classroom, DOE records show.

Records from an investigator’s interview with Di Re’s son show him saying he “doesn’t recall” if someone was bullying him, and that he “does not recall saying he was going to hurt himself in front of his class.”

But Di Re said her son admitted to his initial threat the following day. Another parent whose student was in the class also corroborated what happened, she said. The boy was likely “intimidated” when the investigator interviewed him months after the incident, she said.

Catalano concluded the incidents that the boy’s parents described as bullying and cited as the cause of his suicide threat were separate occurrences that were addressed appropriately by each involved teacher.

Walden, the attorney, encountered some cases that involved that kind of “segmentation,” he said, “where DOE found multiple slices of bread and tried to argue that it wasn’t a loaf.”

Di Re says she was ostracized after calling attention to the situation, which she believes the school mishandled.

“No one would talk to me anymore,” Di Re said. “I walked in, no hellos, no nothing. So I was like the enemy.”

The bullying finally stopped for Di Re’s son in the spring of last year, she said, when he physically defended himself against his primary nemesis.

But Di Re is troubled by issues with bullying at the school and started a Facebook page last year to air them. Other parents have pulled their kids out of the school, she said, but she wants things to actually change and has kept her son there.

“First you have to educate yourself, know your rights,” she said. “And second, you can’t make them discount it.”

“They discount it, they blow it off, because they don’t want to have to make it bullying, because then they have to report it, their numbers go down,” she added. “It’s all about the numbers.”

‘Like Talking To A Wall’

Bobbi Jo Gonzalez’s children’s struggle with bullying unfolded around 2011, a few months into their first school year at PS 97Q in Woodhaven. She said her daughter, then a kindergartner, was having trouble with another kid who would slap her, pinch her and take her things.

It had been going on for about a week when Gonzalez approached the principal. At the meeting, the principal took out a legal pad to take notes, but only jotted down “bits and pieces” of the 10-minute conversation, Gonzalez said.

“Talking to her was pretty much like talking to a wall,” Gonzalez said. “But in my opinion you’d probably get a better response from the wall.”

The principal told the mom that she’d talk to the culprit, and claimed she did in a follow-up conversation a couple days later, Gonzalez said. But the problem continued.

Gonzalez’s son revealed his own bullying problem a couple weeks after her initial chat with the principal, she said. It started with name-calling and escalated in later years with pushing and the “cancer boy” taunts, his mother said.

Things got so bad that at one point in his fifth-grade year he made up an alarming story about a neighbor killing a cat to try to “get away” from the school, his mom said.

“I said, ‘Why exactly did you make up that story?’ I already knew but I wanted to hear it in his words,” she said. “He’s like, ‘ ‘Cause I don’t like it there and I don’t want to go there no more.’ ”

Gonzalez and her husband brought the bullying concerns to school staff frequently but got the “run-around” from the principal and teachers who never proactively followed up, she said.

An assistant principal offered more, Gonzalez said, outlining what she had done to address the problem. One of her son’s bullies got detention once or twice, she said. But nothing ultimately put a stop to the torment.

Gonzalez asked for the children to be transferred out of their classes and away from the kids who were tormenting them, she said, but they were stuck — both are special-education students who had to be in a certain classroom setting and could not be moved.

The kids still deal with bullying at their middle school, Gonzalez said, where the staff addresses it more effectively. But the toll on their emotional well-being continues — her son was diagnosed with anxiety in fifth grade “because of that school,” Gonzalez said, and he and her daughter are both more sensitive to teasing.

“Even when somebody just calls him a name, he’ll come home and he’ll be frustrated and upset and then he’ll start crying,” she said.

‘Outcast’

James was an active, well-liked kid who’s now in fifth grade. He’s a soccer player, an actor and a hip-hop dancer.

But a one-time friend-turned-bully made him into something of an “outcast” at school, said his mother, who requested anonymity to avoid causing any trouble for her son. Patch is using a pseudonym for the boy to protect his privacy.

The torment started in April 2017, when James and his bully were in third grade at PS 173Q in Fresh Meadows. James didn’t tell his parents what was going on at first, though his mother said she noticed unusual bruises on his legs when he would go to shower.

It turned out James was being punched and abused, his mom said. A friend who saw he wasn’t sticking up for himself was the first to report it to a teacher, she said.

James “likes to be friends with everyone,” his mother said. “He’s got a great personality and he felt that if you had to tell on someone then you get called down to the principal’s office.”

He didn’t want that, she said.

“But finally when the teacher approached me and told me what had been going on, that’s when I started to open my eyes and question everything,” his mom added.

The physical attacks continued through the end of the third grade. His mother said she was present for one herself in May 2017 — the bully chased James in a playground outside the school and hit him with a back scratcher. The mom said she and her son went to the school and said, “What kind of nonsense is this?”

The two kids were separated into different classes at the beginning of the following school year, but James’ mother said the bully took to a new tactic — isolating him on the playground. When James’ friends came over to play with him, she said, the bully would command them to stay away.

“They don’t have a choice," his mother said. He “knows how to push people’s buttons.”

James’ mother and her husband approached the principal and assistant principals four or five times about the bullying of their son, she said. The responses seemed uneven.

To her knowledge, the bully was once given detention but may not have actually gone. Staff told James’ mom they would try to keep an eye on the kids outside the school, she said. Regardless, the bullying continued.

“All they’ve done is put a Band-Aid on this,” she said. “This kid has not been reprimanded at all.”

The bully would deny the allegations when school staff call him in to discuss them, James’ mother said, and so would other kids.

In one case, James came home with his new shoes stepped on and dirtied, his mom said, but school staff told her they couldn’t do anything because there was no witness. “I think if something was happening the kid would stop, and obviously the kid is not stopping.”

To add insult to injury, James’ mother said staff started avoiding her in the school. She’s considered moving the boy to a different school for middle school, she said, as she worries the treatment will continue when James and the bully both move up.

“I shouldn’t be running away because of this bully,” she said. “But he hasn’t been taught a lesson, and apparently this kid will do whatever he wants.”

Through the end of the 2018, Patch will continue its in-depth look at society's roles and responsibilities in bullying, which can lead to a child's unthinkable decision to end their own life, in hopes we might offer solutions that save lives.

Do you have a story to tell? Are you concerned about how your local schools handle bullies and their victims?

Email us at bullies@patch.com and share your views in the comments.

Earlier In This Series

• The Bully Menace: When Kids Kill With Words
• America's Shameful Truth About Bullies And School Shootings
• The Hero Myth: Why Expecting Kids To Fight Bullies Is Harmful
• 'They All Failed And Changed A Child': Bullying Detailed
• Teen Tells Bullies In Video: 'Every Day I Wear Your Words'
• Teen's 'I Wear Your Words' Video Inspires Nashville Songwriters
• Bullying Of Mallory Grossman Detailed In Lawsuit Against School
• Bullies And Their Targets The Same: Digital Self-Harm Rising
• Why These Kindergartners Start Each Day With A Respectful Handshake
• Bullying In New York City Schools Never Worse: Survey
• The Bully Menace: 13 Great Books For Kids Of All Ages

(Lead image: PS 97Q is seen in Woodhaven, Queens. Image from Google Maps)

(Lead image: Photo by Cultura/Shutterstock)