My son, getting interviewed by our local news network after we saw the movie Bully. Photo credit: Andrea Schwalm.
Not long after my children returned to public school after two-and-a-half years of homeschooling, it started.
At this point, my older son was in 8th grade and so gym meant changing in a locker room with the other kids in his class. A couple of his peers developed a habit of coming up behind my son while he was changing, cupping his chest, and informing him that he had breasts. On the gym floor and in the hallways between classes, these boys would leer moon-faced at my child and call him “Scoops.” At the time, my son shared none of this with his father or me or his inclusion teacher or the school psychologist that he was seeing once a week.
Part of the reason that we’d decided to homeschool in the first place was because my younger son had been physically bullied in elementary school — finally, after a third call in as many days from the school nurse telling me that my 2nd grader had been injured again by a peer at recess, and a third day of ignored calls to discuss the matter with the principal, I picked both children up from school and left a message with the principal saying, “I will allow these children back on school grounds when I have a guarantee that they will be safe.”
One day passed. No phone call. Two days passed. I called the district superintendent’s office. A message was taken.
