BROWNSTOWN — The mother of four Brownstown Central Community School Corp. students questioned the school board about its bullying policy on Tuesday night.
Bayley Willey asked the trustees during their monthly meeting at the administration building to look at that policy.
“I want to start by defining two very important terms that I will be using tonight,” she said during her three minutes of allotted time to speak.
“Bullying is the act of one or more individuals intimidating one or more individuals through verbal, physical, mental electronic or written actions as defined on the page 8 of the 2023-24 handbook as I could not find the handbook available online to me for this year,” she said. “Transparent is being free from pretense or deceit, open and honest, as defined by the Merriam Webster Dictionary. As a school district, you guys have failed on both of definitions.”
Willey said on Aug. 8, one of her four children who attend a corporation school, was verbally threatened and physically assaulted on a bus home.
“I followed standard protocol to find out what happened,” she said. “I started with the teacher (and) the bus driver that evening. Then I escalated to the vice principal and the principal the following morning, I have been met with more questions than answers. When asking for general protocol for consequences, I couldn’t even be told a rule of thumb to follow.”
Willey said she then asked everyone she could including the principal, vice principal, school resource officer, school counselor and the superintendent.
“… and now I’m asking you,” she said. “I can tell you what happens if my child is caught with a cellphone. I can tell you what happens if I fail to send my child to school.”
Willey also said she could find a list of consequences at neighboring school corporations ranging from a verbal reprimand all the way to expulsion such as listed in Cortland Elementary School and North Vernon Elementary School current students’ handbooks available to the public.
She also said she has been met with (in the incident involving her child) that it wasn’t an act of bullying because bullying is defined as repeated acts.
“Yet using your own definition of bullying as outlined in your student handbook from last year, it does not say repeated acts,” she said.
Willey said transparency is one thing that she, along with several other families who have contacted me with similar stories, have failed to see when it comes to trustees.
“Based upon state bullying reports that are required by law to be statehouse each year for public access, it seems that you leaders are more concerned with a statistic at the state level than taking care of the same children you promised to take care of day in and day out,” she said. “So, my question to you is “When we will as a school corporation going to begin to be transparent and allow incidents to be seen for what they really are instead of sweeping them under the rug and hoping everyone goes along with.”
In other matters, trustees approved two emergency allocations of $8,840.01 for July including $5,600 to Southern Indiana Refrigeration for servicing the walk-in cooler at the elementary school. The second emergency allocation of $3,240.01 was paid to B&H Electric for a motor for the middle school HVAC. The expenditures leave a balance of $55,653.28 in the emergency allocation fund.
Trustees also approved the appointments of Shannon Barger, eighth-grade girls basketball coach; Jill Carlin, split yearbook position with Mendy Ferguson; Janelle Deck, fifth-grade volunteer volleyball coach, Zoe Fountain, high school girls softball volunteer coach; Jack Griffin, high school choir and musical volunteer; Rex Kovert, temporary agriculture teacher; and Andy Lockman and Michelle Sowders, bus aides for special education Route 2.