‘Want to know why a culture of bullying in schools causes them to lose money and what you can do if you or your child suffers bullying? Here are all the facts you need to know about and the steps you can take if you’re a parent of a bullied child.
“When bullied children stay home to avoid hurtful relationships, schools lose tens of millions of dollars each year, a study says.” (Education Week)
According to The Atlantic (theatlantic.com) in a 2013 article by Eleanor Barkham, “160,000 kids stay home from school each day to avoid being bullied.” (https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp/.theatlantic.com/amp/article/280201/)
It adds up. Imagine those numbers per week, per month, and school year.
Each state receives federal funding for education.
You will learn all about the culture of bullying in schools and why educational institutions lose money. Moreover, you will learn what they’re doing about it and why you should be concerned. Lastly, you will learn what you can do if you or your child is stuck in a school where bullies run amuck.
Once you learn all of this life-saving information, you will be prompted to take steps to get yourself or your child out of a toxic learning environment. Then, you will select a school where you or your kid can learn in peace and flourish.
This post is all about the culture of bullying in schools and why they lose money. It’s also about what these schools are doing about it and why you should be concerned. Lastly, it’s about the importance of transferring your child to a safer school so that they can learn in a safe environment.
Culture of Bullying In Schools
The federal government funds the states, then each state funds each of its schools a specific dollar amount per day, per child in attendance. Therefore, when a student is absent from class on any given day, the school loses money for that particular student that day.
Many schools choose to sweep incidences of bullying under the rug. Moreover, it’s the victims who others label the troublemakers. In other words, they blame the incident victim of bullying for the abuse they suffer. Even worse people punish the target while letting the bullies off the hook.
This only encourages the bullies to bully the victim again later. Then, the abuse becomes a cycle that only repeats itself. This is why many victims skip school to avoid their tormentors and the teachers and staff who continuously blame them for their own suffering.
I don’t blame these kids for staying home. Many times, I skipped class myself when I was in school. All because of bullying.
Who wants to be in an environment where people continuously abuse them? You might as well stay home because you’re so busy watching your back that you don’t learn anything.
If school staff fails to address bullying at the district level, more bullied kids will skip school to avoid being tormented. Therefore, schools will lose more funds.
In my opinion, it serves these schools right! It’s funny how things always run full circle!
Reasons to Leave a Toxic Environment
A Positive Environment
When you’re in the right environment, you thrive instead of survive. In other words, when you can learn in a place that is accepting, loving, and nurturing, you can grow and flourish.
In a positive environment, under the right conditions, you feel free to be yourself. You can express your own ideas and opinions confidently and without fear.
Also, you feel safe and secure. You can be confident and build positive relationships with others. Thus giving you the freedom to create and to show your talents.
The people around you encourage and support you. They cooperate and give you the freedom to be and do. Moreover, they gently nudge and push you to be your best. This is the kind of environment that nurtures your soul.
Whereas, in the wrong environment, you stumble and fall. When you’re stuck somewhere that is toxic, oppressive, restrictive, and harmful, you only survive.
In other words, you don’t work at your full potential. You only squeeze by. Instead of grow, you only stagnate, or worse, regress. In other words, instead of flourish, you only wither.
Culture of bullying In Schools:
A Toxic Environment
In a toxic environment, under terrible conditions, you aren’t free. You’re only a prisoner. You’re a slave – a victim.
Humans need more than just food and water to survive. They also need positivity and encouragement. They need healthy people around them. Also, human beings need diverse experiences instead of sameness.
Sadly, a toxic, bullying environment only promotes sameness. It doesn’t tolerate any form of diversity because it loathes anything different.
Environmental stimuli have a huge impact on your mental health and social interactions. Moreover, it can make you bitter or better. Your environment can either cause you to progress or regress.
Therefore, if you find yourself in an environment that sucks the oxygen out of you, you must remove yourself from it. Though it may not always be easy to do. Leaving a toxic place will salvage your self-esteem and mental health. In doing so, you will save yourself a lot of stress and heartache. Moreover, you will save yourself months of recovery.
Flowers Can’t Grow and Bloom Without Sunlight
Self-doubt kills dreams. It comes when bullies and abusers shower a target person with toxicity. Therefore, when all a person gets are insults and abuse for a long period of time, they become exhausted. Moreover, any positivity they once had is slowly drained from them until they’re totally depleted of it.
Eventually, if targets aren’t careful, they’ll start to believe their abusers. In other words, they’ll start seeing themselves through the eyes of their bullies. They’ll give up and others will see in them, a person who’s lackluster and slow.
When you’re a target of bullying, you’re like a flower that gets nothing but constant rain. The flower doesn’t grow and develop properly.
The consistent abuse zaps your energy and keeps you hyper-vigilant and on guard 24/7- waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Culture of bullying in Schools:
Bullying takes away your spirit.
In other words, you’re in survival mode. And you lose your happiness, confidence, pride, will, and purpose in life. In essence, your bullies take away your good qualities and turn you into a person you don’t even recognize anymore.
Bullying and abuse takes the joy out of your life. Moreover, you begin to daydream about escaping your current situation. If there is no escape route available, you feel stuck.
Then, you isolate yourself and become a recluse. You retreat into your own little fantasy world because it just feels safer that way.
Finally, you stop growing as a person because you live inside your head instead of observing life that’s going on around you. As a result you stop and learning the lessons life is trying to teach you.
All the while, the bullying and abuse you suffer only gets worse because everyone around you knows that you’re living inside your head and they ridicule you for it.
And people do not know what you are going through. Therefore, they may mistake you for being lazy, slow, or foolish.
However, it only causes you to retreat further inside yourself and the bullying only gets worse. It is a vicious cycle, and it is no way to live!
Culture of Bullying in Schools:
You must have a good balance of positive and negative experiences.
Not only do I understand how you feel inside, I understand why. Just as flowers can’t grow without sunlight, people can’t grow without positivity.
Flowers need a good balance of rain and sunlight and people need a good balance of positivity and negativity. They cannot survive on just negativity nor positivity.
Too much negativity or, in this case, toxicity, and the person’s emotional and psychological growth will be stunted. Moreover, their happiness, confidence, and dreams will die. As a result, they’ll give up.
Too much positivity, and they lose touch with the real world and real people. Therefore, they become arrogant, full of themselves, demanding, and tyrannical!
There has to be a healthy balance of both before a person can truly grow.
Culture of bullying in schools:
Never accept anything your bullies tell you.
Therefore, if you’re a target of bullying, never accept what bullies and abusers try to cram down your throat. I want you to realize that they don’t know you at all.
Although they may claim they know you more than you know yourself. The truth is, nobody can possibly know you like you do. Moreover, anyone who tells you otherwise is lying through their teeth.
Understand that bullies and abusers are miserable people who want you to be as miserable as they are. Therefore, stay away from those people. They aren’t worth your time or energy. Only keep company with people who love you and who uplift you!
Remember that there’s always hope. Also, realize that you’re worth much more than what your bullies say. Never let bullies destroy the things inside you that matter the most.
And those things are your self-love, self-respect, confidence, and sense of pride. Those things are yours and not for anyone else to have!
And how you do this is through self-care. If at all possible, remove yourself from the bullying environment. Go to a new place where you can grow and flourish.
In a new environment, you have the chance to make friends and be not only accepted, but celebrated!
Be your own hero and best friend. Be your own sunlight! Keep company with people who allow you to shine and the sun to shine on you!
This post was all about the culture of bullying in schools so that you can know whether your school has that toxic culture and convince your family to take advantage of school choice.
Related posts you’ll enjoy:
1. School Choice: Why it’s a Godsend for Bullied Kids!
2. Bullying by Teachers in School: 7 Steps to Protect Yourself
3. Why do Schools Ignore Bullying? 7 Reasons Schools Do Nothing
4. Bullying Support: 7 Resources You Can Reach Out to
5. Things School Bullies Try to Hide: 13 Things They’re Ashamed Of
I have to ask, Cherie, did you write this post especially with me in mind? I experienced just about everything you have written here, both what I experienced and getting out of the environment.
Honestly, Michael, I wrote it with every victim and target of bullying in mind. But this relates to you as it does me, so I know writing this was the right thing to do. Thank you so much for your comment.
It is tough in the modern day school (not that bullying didn’t always occur). I completely understand why more and more people Home School their kids or put them in private schools. There are some great alternative programs out there these days.
In regards to bullying, kids have gotten worse. All one has to do is listen to kids talking to one another and adults and hearing an excessive amount of sexual talk, profanity, etc at a very young age. And kids will often cuss out an adult and even try to physically assault them in some cases. I think most of us grew up being taught to respect adults and authority figures and even if we didn’t like them, we kept it to ourselves. Now bullying is worse than ever, many are committing suicide over it. And can you imagine how bad things would have been if the internet was a large part of our raising. Now bullying can be 24/7.
And most schools have terrible, useless bullying policies. There was also a time where you trusted and knew teachers (not that some aren’t still great but unfortunately many of them don’t last these days in schools). If a kid got in trouble at school, they were going to be in trouble at home and usually they trusted the teacher’s judgement and version of what happened at school. Now, some teachers are bullies or will take the side of the bully. It has really changed in that regard. And let me say this in fairness to good teachers. The system has made it hard because you can’t really do anything to students. You send them to the office too many times, that teacher is told they need better classroom management. Failing a student is frowned upon. Corporal punishment is all but gone in most school systems. Even things like making them stay after school for an hour for poor behavior or not completing their work is ridiculous. They did nothing throughout the day, so you think an extra hour is going to change that dynamic.
It is sad because it has ruined it for great teachers and it has ruined it for students eager to learn. And way too many kids make themselves sick or live in fear of going to school because they know they will be tormented.
You make great points here, Bradley. Sadly, most schools are run by teacher’s unions and such and teacher’s unions are a waste of time. Most don’t care anything about the teachers or the kids for that matter. All they are is money machines to make certain school officials rich. And anti-bullying policies sure aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. All schools have anti-bullying policies because the government requires them to. However, they don’t enforce those policies and if you don’t enforce it, you might as well not have it. It’s a crying shame.