More than 200 parents and community leaders showed up at a hearing on bullying, many of them pointing fingers at everyone from school administrators to City Council members for not effectively responding.
But before city school officials and the City Council's education committee heard testimony from the crowd, they made sure that parents didn't neglect to point a finger at themselves when it came to student behavior.
"This was not intended as a beat-up on the Baltimore City school system," City Council President Bernard C. "Jack" Young told parents at the meeting he called Wednesday night. "This was to figure out how to help the school system."
Young called on schools CEO Andrés Alonso and other school officials to address bullying and hear parent testimony after an April incident at Gilmor Elementary school in which a parent of a third-grader said her daughter threatened to kill herself and attempted to jump out of a window to escape bullies at Gilmor Elementary School. City school officials said the girl's teacher reported that the student only said she wanted to commit suicide.
Alonso held steadfast Wednesday to his initial response to the incident, that suspension — often the most desired response to bullying — was not the answer to combating bullying. He provided data that showed the schools system's suspension rate has dropped by more than half since 2004, which he correlated to an equally declining dropout rate.
"If you push them out of school, you push them to consequences in the future," Alonso said. "We are convinced that the outcomes are showing that the bottom line is that if we are keeping kids in school, we are successful," he added. "The work to get to those outcomes is much harder."
But Alonso acknowledged that the school system has work to do in addressing the problem. He said national bullying statistics suggest that more than a quarter of the 85,000 students in the city school system feel they are being bullied. He called the problem "grave."
He told parents that one thing the school system needs to do better is provide access to standardized reporting forms. The school system has noted 155 bullying suspensions this year, compared with 109 last year. Alonso said he believes the number was a result of more responsiveness to bullying reports, but also reflected only a fraction of incidents.
However, he concluded by telling parents, "You guys are our children's first teachers."
Other city officials and experts spoke at the hearing, many who stressed the importance of parenting.
Charles A. Williams of Drexel University's School of Education told parents that no matter how many programs are provided by the school system to deter bullying, the first responsibility lies with them. "One of the things I've seen is that we don't take bullying as seriously as we should until it's too late," he said.
He told parents that they have to "pull their weight" in addressing bullying as it becomes an increasingly prevalent problem.
But some parents said they believed that school and city officials were talking to the wrong audience — that the slide show presentation on dropout statistics and the school system's policies on bullying should be directed to the parents of students who bully.
Others said they believed that the school system's statistics and slew of policies and procedures looked better on paper than they did in action.
Sharonda Edmonds, who said her child was bullied at Glenmount Elementary/Middle, said she received the first response to her bullying complaints during the meeting from city schools' support staff who were on hand.
"They've done more today than they did all school year," Edmonds said. "It's a shame it took so long. My greatest concern is when we have a situation where the [protocol] isn't working — what is it going to take?"