Dwight Satterfield, deputy superintendent of Decatur City Schools, said he has seen very young students involved in what is commonly called cyber bullying.
"Last year, we had an incident where two second grade students were picking on each other on Facebook," Satterfield said.
Morgan County assistant superintendent Tracie Turrentine said the top disciplinary issue she has in her schools today is cyber bullying. She said students will have confrontations with each other on Mondays over social media posts that were posted over the weekend.
"(Social media) just keeps things stirred up between kids that should have already been dropped," Turrentine said. "It can spread so much faster than someone talking to their friend physically."
Turrentine said even though bullying has always been an issue, social media makes it more common.
"They share it and people hide behind their computers a little bit easier than when they do face-to-face," Turrentine said.
The growing number of social media platforms has exacerbated cyber bullying, which can occur on digital devices like cellphones, computers and tablets.
In 2021, a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center found that 41 percent of Americans have experienced some form of online harassment and 25 percent of Americans reported they experienced severe and multiple instances of online harassment. Seventy-five percent of those adults reported they were harassed on social media.
Whitney George, a social worker with Family Support Services in Decatur, said any form of bullying can have detrimental effects on a student's learning abilities and social skills.
"They're more likely to withdraw, not only socially but from school stuff, too," George said. "Their grades will drop sometimes, they just become depressed. When we're depressed, the last thing we want to do is deal with school."
Janice Vest, mental health service coordinator for Morgan County Schools, said she speaks with students almost daily who are the victims of cyber bullying. She said she has noticed students using Snapchat to cyber bully, which is a media sharing app where content is only posted for a short time before it disappears.
"The kids use Snapchat and (their posts) disappear — unless someone takes a picture — so it makes it more difficult to track down," Vest said.
Vest said she starts to see cyber bullying emerge when students enter middle school and the most numerous occurrences happen in seventh and eighth grade.
"At that age, parents are letting them have more freedom with their phones and being online," Vest said.
Annessa Jenkins, a media specialist at Elkmont High School, said high school girls are the demographic she has seen engage in cyber bullying the most, and Elkmont's principal had to resort to suspending a girl last year over a cyber bullying incident.
Jenkins said if cyber bullying is severe enough, it could drive a victim to desperation.
"We had a junior at Elkmont last year that committed suicide," Jenkins said. "It was from a little bit of everything. I think it was being bullied at school, being bullied online. ... I just felt like he didn't know where else to go."
After he died, Jenkins said, the student's parents found that other students had used racial and homophobic slurs to refer to him in posts on multiple social media platforms when the student was a sophomore. Jenkins said the student was dealing with many issues other than cyber bullying and said his friends do not believe it was a crucial factor in his suicide.
"He still dealt with it though," Jenkins said.
EASY ACCESS
Decatur's Satterfield said the Facebook feud involving second graders that he dealt with was one of many instances in which parents failed to police their children's activity online and that parents need to "be aware of the dangers of social media."
Satterfield, who has worked in education for over 30 years, said he remembers when social media could only be accessed through a desktop computer or laptop.
"Myspace was the first social media issue that I had to deal with," Satterfield said. "As the cellphone and the iPad all became a computer ... that's when we started to see more and more (social media apps)."
Satterfield said that social media is almost always involved when the district encounters a bullying incident.
"Years ago, bullying to some extent and harassment ... some of that was person-to-person, peer-to-peer. Social media has put space and time into that," Satterfield said. "Now, with a device in your hand, you can (post) from your bedroom and that other person could be on the other side of town."
Satterfield said parents need to be more aggressive in monitoring their children's social media activity.
"They don't police it because they want their kids to have that connectivity," Satterfield said. "We're one small segment. If parents are not going to patrol what their child does online, we're going to be defeated. Parents should be checking those apps and taking them away at a certain age."
POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS
Vest said Morgan County Schools has a strict policy against having cellphones out at school and forbids students from accessing social media apps on the schools' servers.
Vest said the students who engage in any kind of bullying are usually repeat offenders. She said they will always call the student's parents to inform them of their child's behavior, but sometimes parents do not want to get involved.
"When we contact repeat offenders, their parents are not very concerned," Vest said. "The parents we speak to that are on board and trying, we do seem to see a decline in their child's behavior."
Elkmont's Jenkins has been leading her school's peer helper program and said two of the biggest issues students come to these peers about are substance abuse and cyber bullying.
Jenkins said the peer helper program, which has 24 student peer helpers this year, provides counseling to other students who do not feel comfortable talking to adults about personal issues and also provide academic tutoring.
"A lot of teachers will contact me and tell me of a student who is really struggling and ask to partner them with a peer helper," Jenkins said. "Like if it's math, I'll pair them with someone who is strong in math. If a student's parents are going through a divorce and they're struggling with that, I'll pair them up with a student whose parents are also going through a divorce or they're already divorced."
Jenkins directly blamed social media for the increase in cyber bullying and said social media has "ruined" kids.
"It has ruined some of them academically; some of them don't know how to spell because they're texting and not spelling correctly," Jenkins said. "It mainly ruins them socially and emotionally. If you get on a social media app or a platform and somebody is just dogging you ... that's going to make you feel an inch tall. A lot of that leads to things like anxiety and depression and things like that."
Jenkins said if a student tells a peer helper they are being bullied online and the peer helper determines it is severe, they are to immediately contact her.
"The first option is to report to their supervisor, which is me," Jenkins said. "If it's cyber bullying, then I contact the school counselor immediately. If what they are going through is severe enough, it will be addressed directly by the principal."
Vest said her district received a grant this year to start the peer helper program in Morgan County.
"It hasn't actually started yet, but we're going to do that this year," Vest said. "Having some of the different older kids coming and talking to the younger kids, they're going to listen to peers better than adults."
Morgan County's Turrentine said parents need to better educate themselves about social media apps.
"Children are far more advanced than some parents in technology, and I just think we need to educate ourselves on their language and what they're doing on their social media accounts," Turrentine said.
Vest said younger children do not need to be on social media at all and parents should wait until their child has reached the age of 13 to 14 before they allow them to have a cellphone.
"You don't ever see anything good come out of it, it's always negative," Vest said of social media. "They're going to get into content that they are not ready to see and not emotionally able to handle. The longer parents can wait, the better. Kids don't need a phone."
Family Support Services' George said parents can download Google Family Link, an online app that allows parents to set limits on their children's devices.
"They can control the websites that are visited and apps that are downloaded," George said.
She also said parents can do things like place parental locks on certain apps and websites, cut off Wi-Fi at certain times, or give their children specific times they can be on their devices.
©2022 The Decatur Daily (Decatur, Ala.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
