Cyberbullying addressed in Rockaway schools in wake of suicide
ROCKAWAY TOWNSHIP — Four months after 12-year-old Mallory Grossman died by suicide her mother said was the result of cyberbullying, the school community will hold a number of events geared toward building "a safe cyber community.”
District parent and PTA member Michele Beneduce spearheaded “Your Child and Technology: A Parent's Guide to a Kind and Safe Cyber Community” to be presented in all district schools this week. A parent-only version of the talk will be held Wednesday and Thursday.
Belladuce said she, “just like every other parent in Rockaway Township” is concerned with bullying.
"What happened to Mallory never should have happened. It's my goal to make sure it doesn't happen again,” Beneduce said. “I never want to see a child go through the pain that the Grossmans and the rest of the community have had to go through.”
Mallory Grossman, a Copeland Middle School, took her life due to the unrelenting bullying, said her mother Dianne Grossman.
The Grossmans announced, through their lawyer in August their intent to sue the district for what they allege was a failure to adequately handle complaints their daughter was bullied on social media and at school. The parents, through their lawyer, said they implored education officials to protect their daughter in the months leading to her suicide.
The district posted a message on its website late last month responding to the allegations.
"The allegation that the Rockaway Township School District ignored the Grossman family and failed to address bullying in general, is categorically false," reads the message.
In tears, Beneduce said the recent spike in bullying in township schools reported in The Record/NorthJersey.com has her worried. According to the report, the number of bullying incidents in Rockaway Township schools more than tripled during the last school year. There were 14 confirmed bullying incidents in the district during 2016-17, up from three the prior year, based on an examination of school board meeting minutes over the past two years.
“I personally feel that the system failed and as the adults we need to make changes to protect all of our children,” said Beneduce.
The mother said she reached out to Don't Press Send, Inc. founder Katie Schumacher. Schumacher, a former Long Island school teacher has presented her ideas on the TED stage and said she started the organization because New York educational leaders were failing her children.
“I went to my kids’ school night five years ago and the principal was talking about all of the problems they were having with technology and I am listening and thinking we don’t know what we are doing,” Schumacher said of her fellow adults. “Our kids have the upper hand. They are so fast with all of this. By the time parents get to understand something they are on to something new.”
Schumacher developed a system, tools for a “mindful approach to online communication,” strategies for navigating social media and ideas for regulating the cyber environment to better protect children.
“We are the first generation of parents raising children in the technological era,” Schumacher said.
The problem, she said, is that growing up now is very different than it was for parents.
“We socialized in our streets and face-to-face and by doing that we learned coping skills,” Schumacher said. “We learned resilience. We learned how to stick up for ourselves. We learned that our feelings got hurt and we bounced back. Our children did not grow up this way. Our children grew up very structured, so they don't have the coping skills we had.”
Schumacher stresses the importance of teaching kids to take time to think and to have empathetic skills.
“She really wanted to help our community in an effort to educate and move us forward,” said Beneduce of Schumacher.