Category Archives: NZ Media

Bullies turn to hi-tech torment

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Cellphones and the internet now mean bullied school pupils often get “no respite”, the children’s commissioner says.

“While parents may have been on the receiving end of a small group of bullies in their days at school, their children are potentially exposed to hundreds or thousands of bullies via mobile phone and internet technology,” commissioner Cindy Kiro writes in a report to be made public today.

The report into school safety, headed by Office of the Children’s Commissioner adviser Janis Carroll-Lind, follows calls for a national inquiry by parents of bullying victims at Hutt Valley High School.

In December 2007, nine boys at the school were dragged to the ground and violated by a pack of six classmates.

The report, to be unveiled at a school violence summit in Wellington today, criticises some schools for not even having a policy to deal with bullying and violence.

It cites cases of severe violence in schools being ignored by teachers and of pupils who were too afraid to go to school.

In one case, a student took a knife to school to protect himself after another threatened to stab him. Some schools either have no systems in place to deal with bullying, or the systems are not robust enough to cope when things go wrong, the report finds.

“There is evidence to suggest that in schools where things went wrong, it went horribly wrong.”

Dr Kiro said it was “disappointing” to find that while many pupils were either bullied or knew of others being bullied, most felt there was no point speaking out.

Children who witnessed bullying needed to feel safe to speak out and not condone it, she said. “There’s an awful lot bystanders can do.”

It was also important for parents to understand new forms of bullying, which were potentially dangerous because they could attract a large audience. “In terms of cyberspace, the potential audience is enormous and you can never take it back.”

The report notes that besides negative text messages, mobile phones can be used to gather a large number of pupils in a short time “for example, to the ‘top field’ to witness a fight”.

“Furthermore, mobile phones can film the fight so victims can potentially be re-victimised over and over when the video footage is circulated among a wide network of ‘spectators’.”

It recommends policies restricting mobile phone use at school. It also says many teachers do not use or understand “interactive online technologies” such as chatrooms and email used by their pupils. They need training to understand and address the issues relating to cyber-bullying.

The report also notes there have been instances where serious assaults occurred in schools, warranting police intervention, but police were not notified.

Children as young as five participated in the research. The youngest children reported being called names or being excluded from activities, though some had also been physically bullied with objects like sticks.

Pupils interviewed for the report suggested ways to tackle bullying, including cameras in schools, more teachers on duty, playground supervision, student advocates and red cards for bullies.

Teacher stabbed at Auckland high school

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Teacher stabbed at Auckland high school

Stuff.co.nz | Tuesday, 03 March 2009

An international student has been arrested after a teacher was stabbed in the back while writing on the classroom whiteboard at Auckland’s Avondale College.

The 50-year-old teacher – ‘Mr Warren’, according to information given to students – was taken to Auckland Hospital in a serious condition with wounds to the top of his back. The incident happened at 11.42am.

“A student stabbed a teacher in the back while he was writing on the whiteboard,” a police spokesman said. The student then “just walked off”.

A police statement said a 17-year-old international student was found at a Blockhouse Bay property about an hour after the stabbing and was arrested by police. An associate of the Korean teenager – who had only been at Avondale College for a couple of weeks – was also at the home and assisting police.

About 20 students were in the class at the time of the stabbing – the third period of the school day – and are receiving counselling.

One shocked student being propped up by her father was led from the school gates about an hour after the stabbing. Too upset to speak to media, she only nodded when asked if she’d seen the teacher be stabbed.

The classroom where the stabbing happened has been cordoned off.

College principal Brent Lewis said the school was now in “lockdown”. While the incident was very upsetting, he now had to concentrate on dealing with students and staff.

“My emotions don’t come into it at the moment.”

Mr Lewis said he had been trying to keep students fully informed about what had happened.

– with NZPA

Boy coaxed down from school roof

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Boy coaxed down from school roof

JARED MORGAN – The Southland Times | Thursday, 26 February 2009

Police negotiators were needed to coax a bullied 10-year-old boy down from a Southland school rooftop after he threatened to jump yesterday.

The threats by the boy to jump from the single-storey school building sparked a full emergency response in Invercargill.

Senior Sergeant Dave Raynes said police, the Fire Service and St John paramedics were called to Ascot Community School, on Tay St, about 11.45am.

Police negotiators were able to talk him down before taking him to the Invercargill police station to be dealt with by medical professionals, including mental health services, he said.

The boy was uninjured in the incident.

The boy’s mother said yesterday her son had been involved in several squabbles with other students at the school since the start of the week.

He and his younger brother had been brought home by police on Monday after she said the younger boy allegedly threatened another child with scissors, while police told her that her older son had thrown a chair at another student.

On Tuesday, the 10-year-old was involved in a squabble with two other children, a boy and a girl, who taunted him about scarring from burns he received in a house fire almost two years’ ago and the fact he had been taken away by police the day before, she said.

Then, yesterday, her son and the boy again had a confrontation, leading to her son punching the boy, the woman said.

“I was a called at 9.30am and told to come and pick him up because he had been stood down.”

While she was meeting with the principal to discuss the matter, her son and the boy had another confrontation, leading to him climbing on to the roof to “get away from him.”

The incidents were the result of her son not coping with the burns to his chest, stomach and thighs, caused by standing too close to a stove at the family’s Yarrow St home in June 2007.

He still wears a pressure suit as a result of the injuries and had been subjected to bullying, she said.

The school and principal Wendy Ryan had been supportive of her son but she felt more needed to be done to protect him from bullying, the woman said.

Mrs Ryan could not be reached for comment yesterday.

Board sacked to protect pupils

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By EMILY WATT – The Dominion Post | Friday, 30 January 2009

The Government has sacked a second school board in a fortnight after revelations its teachers were hitting, swearing at and denigrating pupils.

Education Minister Anne Tolley dissolved the board of South Auckland’s Sir Edmund Hillary Collegiate yesterday and replaced it with a commissioner to safeguard pupils.

The move followed a damning Education Review Office report which raised “serious concerns about student safety and about the quality of teaching” at the school. The 1280-pupil co-ed state school is decile one, meaning it teaches pupils from the poorest and most deprived communities and homes. It is one of 10 South Auckland secondary schools that had police officers posted on the grounds as part of a pilot scheme last year to fight crime, and gather intelligence about youth gangs and drug dealing.

Mrs Tolley dissolved the board of trustees at Auckland’s Selwyn College on Tuesday last week after the office criticised differences between board members and the community which had resulted in falling enrolments.

In the latest sacking, ERO said the board had failed to provide a safe environment.

“The physical and emotional abuse of students by a few teachers is a long-standing issue that has been brought to the board’s attention in the past. This abuse by some teachers includes hitting, swearing at and denigrating students,” the report says.

Mrs Tolley said the abuse was concerning. “That is totally unacceptable. Student safety is paramount.”

Sir Edmund Hillary Collegiate is effectively three schools – junior, middle and senior. ERO found a climate of mistrust among the school’s three principals and said the board’s inadequacy hindered the school’s ability to provide quality education.

Given the report’s allegations, Mrs Tolley said she had no hesitation appointing a commissioner to replace the board.

The former executive principal of Diocesan School, Gail Thomson, would take over today.

Former pupil Charles Makakea, who graduated last year, said he was surprised to hear the board was under fire.

“It was a good school,” he said.

He had heard reports of teachers hitting students, “but I didn’t know for sure”.

A former teacher said it was a low-decile school and there were a lot of tensions for teachers.

“I understand it’s also a hard-to-staff school.”

But though it was a difficult environment, there were no excuses for the behaviour described in the report.

Post Primary Teachers Association president Kate Gainsford said it was appalling that concerns had reached such serious levels without effective support for the board being put in place earlier.

“Maintaining discipline and managing safety in challenging circumstances can be difficult for trained professionals who are working full time. For volunteers devoting their spare time to shoulder such heavy responsibilities, [it] is a tall order.”

ERO will return to the school within 12 months.

Letting infants watch TV can do more harm than good says wide-ranging international review

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http://esciencenews.com/articles/2009/01/13/letting.infants.watch.tv.can.do.more.harm.good.says.wide.ranging.international.review

Published: Tuesday, January 13, 2009

A leading child expert is warning parents to limit the amount of television children watch before the age of two, after an extensive review published in the January issue of Acta Paediatrica showed that it can do more harm than good to their ongoing development. Professor Dimitri A Christakis, from the Seattle Children’s Research Institute and the University of Washington, USA, has also expressed considerable concerns about DVDs aimed at infants that claim to be beneficial, despite a lack of scientific evidence.

And he points out that France has already taken the matter so seriously that in summer 2008 the Government introduced tough new rules to protect the health and development of children under three from the adverse effects of TV.

Professor Christakis’ extensive review looked at 78 studies published over the last 25 years and reiterates the findings of numerous studies he has carried out with colleagues into this specialist area.

He points out that as many as nine in ten children under the age of two watch TV regularly, despite ongoing warnings, and some spend as much as 40 per cent of their waking hours in front of a TV.

“No studies to date have demonstrated benefits associated with early infant TV viewing” says Professor Christakis, whose review looked at the effect that TV has on children’s language, cognitive skills and attentional capacity, as well as areas for future research.

“The weight of existing evidence suggests the potential for harm and I believe that parents should exercise due caution in exposing infants to excessive media” he says.

“For example, the American Academy of Paediatrics discourages TV viewing in the first two years of life, but only six per cent of parents are aware of this advice despite ongoing publicity.”

Key findings of Professor Christakis’ review includes:

  • 29 per cent of parents who took part in a survey of 1,000 American families published in 2007 said they let their infants watch TV because they thought it was “good for their brains”. But claims made by manufacturers are not substantiated by peer-reviewed medical papers and industry studies.
  • Watching TV programmes or DVDs aimed at infants can actually delay language development, according to a number of studies. For example, a 2008 Thai study published in Acta Paediatrica found that if children under 12 months watched TV for more than two hours a day they were six times more likely to have delayed language skills. Another study found that children who watched baby DVDs between seven and 16 months knew fewer words than children who did not.
  • Infants as young as 14 months will imitate what they see on a TV screen, but they learn better from live presentations. For example, one study found that children learnt Mandarin Chinese better from a native speaker than they did from a video of the same speaker.
  • A study of 1,300 children conducted by the author and colleagues in 2004 found a modest association between TV viewing before the age of three and attentional problems at the age of seven, after a wide range of other factors were ruled out.
  • In another study, the author and colleagues looked at the effects of early TV viewing on cognitive development at school age. They found that children who had watched a lot of TV in their early years did not perform as well when they underwent tests to check their reading and memory skills.
  • More than one in five parents who took part in another study said that they got their infants to watch TV when they needed time to themselves. This, says the author, is an understandable and realistic need, but not one that should be actively promoted.

But why does television have such a negative effect on children of this age? “We believe that one reason is the fact that it exposes children to flashing lights, scene changes, quick edits and auditory cuts which may be over stimulating to developing brains” says Professor Christakis. “TV also replaces other more important and appropriate activities like playing or interacting with parents.”

There have been concerns about infants viewing TV for the last four decades but it has only been in recent years that studies have provided the empirical data to back up those concerns.

“The explosion in infant TV viewing and the potential risks associated with it raise several important policy implications” concludes Professor Christakis.

“First and foremost, the lack of regulation related to claims made by people promoting programmes and DVDs aimed at infants is problematic. Educational claims should, and can, be based on scientific data. Despite this, the names of the products and the testimonials they use often convince parents that TV viewing has a positive impact on their infants.

“Secondly, parents need to be better informed about what activities really do promote healthy development in young children. This may provide some defence against the aggressive marketing techniques being employed.

“Last, but not least, more resources need to be made available to fund critical research related to the effects of media on young children.”