Bullying incidents have quadrupled since 2018. Why can't schools do anything about it?

Dylan Ryan King dreads going to school each day. The seventh-grader braces for the next taunt from a classmate or poke from a teasing hand. For this young teenager with autism, managing his emotions while being bullied can become more than he can bear.

"Every time I come home, I feel like I need to go in my room, lock myself in there and just scream into pillows, cry my eyes out," Dylan said in the living room of his Bayville home.

After a long day, he rubs his fingers through the speckled fur of his German shorthair pointer Cassie to help calm down and let go of the day's stresses.

The bullying directed at Dylan does not stop, said his mother MaryAnn Salanitro, who said she has gone to his school multiple times for help.

"How am I going to help him get through this?" she said. "At night, I can't sleep because I'm worried. How am I going to go the next day, address it to the school and have them help… fix it?"

Dylan is not alone in his struggles with bullies. Across New Jersey, bullying is on the rise, according to a report released in December by the New Jersey Anti-Bullying Task Force.

Between 2018 and 2023, bias-based incidents in New Jersey schools quadrupled, according to the report.

Under the New Jersey Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights, schools are required to act when a student is harassed, intimidated or bullied, which is known by its acronym as a "HIB" incident. Such incidents require school investigations and documentation. If a student commits three HIB incidents, their principal is supposed to create an intervention plan to deter the behavior.

But too often, bullying continues unabated.

Dr. Stuart Green, founder of the New Jersey Coalition for Bullying Awareness and Prevention, says the state's schools and school officials too often ignore bullying until a tragedy happens. He noted prominent suicides of victims of bullying, such as that of Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi, who jumped to his death after he was recorded without his knowledge kissing a man. The video was then posted by peers to social media.

Green also noted the death of Central Regional High School freshman Adriana Kuch, who killed herself last year after she was attacked in a school hallway and the video of the beating was shared online. The Kuch family announced last week that they were suing school officials, saying the school knew about the bullying but failed to take timely action.

Related: One year after student's suicide, Central Regional faces lawsuit from family

"The only progress we've made on bullying in this state is tragedy-driven," Green said. "We only seem to make progress on this issue (legally) when children are grievously harmed, and in fact, die by suicide."

Though only the most extreme bullying cases make national news, such aggression remains a common occurrence inside American schools. About 1 in 5 students reported being victims of bullying between 2014 and 2019, according to a report on bullying from the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

Social media has added a new dimension, said Robin Carlock, a licensed clinical social worker at Thriveworks, a mental health company with offices in Red Bank and Toms River. Victims no longer have peace once they are home; bullies can prey on them around the clock, through smartphones and computers, she said.

Social media expands the reach of bullies to new levels, Carlock said.

"It's not just the people in the school now," she said. "You're getting hit by other pupils in the school and their cousins and family. So it's… a lot more widespread once social media kind of gets kicked in."

Often, it takes more than discipline to stop a child from acting out bullying behavior, Carlock said.

"The child who is the bully has a lot of anger and a lot of emotions that they don't know how to convey or talk to someone about," she said. "It ends up being bullying."

Because of this, both victim and bully need guidance and supportive resources, Carlock said. Sometimes that means helping a child who is bullying see themselves in a new way, but that can prove challenging for the adults around them.

"They created such an identity of the 'scary person' that they have to uphold it," Carlock said. "And then they start getting into some of the wrong crowds."

A 2007 study published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine found that children who were bullies and who were victims of bullies tended to have a broader range of social and emotional problems than their peers. In addition, boys who bullied and were victims of bullying were at risk for criminality later in life, if they also had a high level of psychiatric symptoms, the researchers found.

For children who bully, "discipline is definitely appropriate, but also, how do we help them?" Carlock said.

Strengthening New Jersey's bullying laws

While schools are moving away from discipline-only methods of management on bullying and are working to improve their social climates, a group of experts say New Jersey's anti-bullying laws and school funding system are not sufficient to slow the growing problem.

The Education Law Center, based in Newark, called on state leaders in November to devote more money and additional state resources to the issue.

In Nov. 15 testimony to the state Anti-Bullying Task Force, the organization said: "Intake calls to ELC involving complaints of students experiencing bullying or harassment at school are on the rise, so our perception is that there is much more work to be done to ensure that our public schools provide a safe learning environment for all students.

"We continue to hear accounts – from a variety of school districts and charter schools around the state – of incidents of harassment, intimidation, and bullying in which no written report was filed, no investigation undertaken, no results reported and, most significantly, no relief from HIB provided to the target."

Education Law Center attorney Elizabeth Athos said safe and supportive schools are a requirement for learning.

However, "not all schools do that for all students," she said. "There are particular groups of students that seem to fare worse than others."

Green, of the New Jersey Coalition for Bullying Awareness and Prevention, said students find legal protection from bullying when schools fail to respond, not from the Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights, but rather from the state's Law Against Discrimination.

The Law Against Discrimination provides students in certain groups – racial and religious minorities, students with disabilities and LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning or queer) youth – protections from discrimination and bias.

Despite the protections, in June, 2023, New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin and then-Acting Commissioner Angelica Allen-McMillan, of the state Department of Education, acknowledged a serious bullying problem in New Jersey and described a "rising tide of bias and hate" in schools.

In a joint statement, they said that the New Jersey Division on Civil Rights and the Department of Education would "encourage all New Jersey schools, school boards, and administrators to continue to develop and implement initiatives to counter bias; to continue to display inclusive markers, flags, and symbols in and around their buildings; to continue to ensure students have access to books representing a diversity of experiences and identities; and to continue to implement and comply with the state’s anti-bias curricula requirements regarding race, gender, LGBTQIA+, disability, and diversity."

The Law Against Discrimination protects students in these groups, but leaves out other victims of bullying, Green said.

"I was hoping… to encourage the (New Jersey) Legislature to add what's called 'private cause of action' language to the current Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights," he said. The private cause of action language would give "parents, families the option of bringing lawsuits based on the ABR (Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights) against the schools themselves."

Currently, schools have immunity in cases of student-on-student harassment, intimidation or bullying, Green said.

"When you don't have language like that in a law, it inhibits lawyers from taking the cases except in the most egregious circumstances, like a child has died," he said.

Green said parents need ways to enforce the Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights in New Jersey, but currently do not have a clear route unless they can use the Law Against Discrimination.

"Bullying is virtually never a single incident," he said. "Because bullying is repeated – a series of negative acts, almost always – schools have more than enough time, and ideally awareness, to be able to prevent bullying from occurring at all or continuing. And they just don't take adequate action, partly because they wait for incidents to occur."

Schools need to prioritize bullying prevention efforts, but many are not, Green said.

"The youth who hurt children have typically been operating aggressively in the school for months, for years," he said. "There's enough adults in every school to be well aware of who those kids are and how they're behaving… How is it addressed? What is the school doing about those kids?"

Amanda Oglesby is an Ocean County native who covers education and the environment. She has worked for the Press for more than a decade. Reach her at @OglesbyAPP, aoglesby@gannettnj.com or 732-557-5701.

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: In NJ, many say schools are failing those who are bullied and their attackers