ALABAMA SCHOOLS MUST TAKE STEPS TO PREVENT BULLYING

Thankfully, gone are the days in which bullying at school was just seen as a fact of life that kids just had to live with. While many people did in fact work through and overcome bullying issues, that does not make the practice right or acceptable.

Indeed, Alabama lawmakers have recognized that this state’s schools have an affirmative obligations to the student in their care to prevent them from being bullied. At a minimum, the school must have policies in place that define bullying and also impose punishments for such behavior.

The policies must also ensure that students have channels through which they can report bullying while being safe from revenge or retaliation. The policy must cover not only behavior that happens at school activities or on school grounds but even behavior that happens in students’ personal time, including their time spent on social media or engaged in other online activity.

What this means is that parents who have children who are victims of bullying need to know that while the school cannot be expected to prevent every instance of bullying, they are expected to take reasonable steps to prevent and to punish it effectively should it happen. A school’s failure to do so quite simply puts the school in violation of the laws of this state.

Parents who have children who are victims of bullying may have a lot of legal options available to them, some of which they might not even be aware of. In addition to calling the police, remedies through the civil courts and through the school may be possible. An experienced attorney can be helpful in exploring one’s options.