Survey shows seven-year peak in student bullying in Franklin County, North Quabbin

Data from a 2024 survey conducted by the Communities That Care Coalition reveals a peak in reports of bullying in Franklin County and the North Quabbin region.

Data from a 2024 survey conducted by the Communities That Care Coalition reveals a peak in reports of bullying in Franklin County and the North Quabbin region. CONTRIBUTED IMAGE/COMMUNITIES THAT CARE COALITION

By ANTHONY CAMMALLERI

Staff Writer

Published: 10-23-2024 5:58 PM

Modified: 10-27-2024 10:50 PM


This article is the last installment in a four-part series exploring the results of the Communities That Care Coalition’s 2024 Student Health Survey. The Communities That Care Coalition is co-hosted by the Franklin Regional Council of Governments (FRCOG) and Community Action Pioneer Valley.

While results of the Communities That Care Coalition’s 2024 Student Health Survey have shown improvements in teens’ mental health and substance use habits, students reported a seven-year peak in instances of bullying and discriminatory teasing.

Since 2003, the Communities That Care Coalition has surveyed more than 40,000 students in grades eight, 10 and 12 from all nine public school districts in Franklin County and the North Quabbin region to evaluate youth habits and overall emotional and physical health.

For the third year, the coalition has administered the Department of Education School Climate Survey, which addresses students’ safety in their schools and perceptions of their environments.

This year, roughly 12% of survey respondents reported that sometimes they stay home because they do not feel safe going to school. When the survey was first administered in 2017, approximately 7% of responding students answered similarly. In 2020, this rose to roughly 10%.

Between 2017 and 2024, the number of teens who reported that other students at their schools tried to stop bullying decreased from roughly 62% of respondents to 42%. This decrease coincides with higher reported rates of racial bullying, up from roughly 21% to 30%, and bullying based on one’s “real or perceived” sexual orientation or gender identity, up from roughly 35% to 45%.

According to Communities That Care Coalition Coordinator Kat Allen, the increases in racial or sexuality-based bullying reflect a broader national trend. She added that the regional statistics could either be interpreted as an indication of a student population that is more aware of the harassment, or as a sign of an uptick in bullying.

“These statistics are complicated — you can conceive of good and bad explanations of this. It could be that bullying is going up, and it could be that students are more sensitive, more knowledgeable of it,” Allen said. “A lot of this, I believe, starts at a national level. If we’re seeing more conflict, teasing, picking on people, at a national level, whether it’s online forums, on TikTok, on social media, and it seems to be playing out locally.”

Allen emphasized that bullying is tied to aspects of personal identity such as race and sexuality, and that perceptions of the problem’s severity vary across the demographics surveyed.

The survey results show that 58% of LGBTQ students believe students at their schools are teased about their sexualities; whereas, only roughly 42% of heterosexual students agree.

Similar disparities in students’ perceptions on bullying exist among races, too. Nearly 60% of Black students responded that they believed their classmates were teased about their racial identities, whereas roughly 48% of the Latino students surveyed, 41% of Asian students, 37% of Indigenous students and 30% of white students felt the same.

“It’s important to notice that, it’s not just that students are being teased or picked on, but they’re being teased or picked on about their race and ethnicity and about their sexual orientation,” Allen said. “Some of that is perception, but that perception really matters, and it means that we as adults need to catch up and help out more. ... It’s really happening across all of the school districts.”

For more information about the Student Health Survey data, visit communitiesthatcarecoalition.com/surveys.

Anthony Cammalleri can be reached at acammalleri@recorder.com or 413-930-4429.