Ariyana

My name is Ariyana, and I am a sophomore in high school. Today, I would like to talk about how school staff can better support students who experience bullying. I have personally experienced bullying since elementary school. In elementary school, I was bullied for my appearance, which has impacted me in many ways—now I feel like I can’t look at myself the same or feel as confident as I did as a kid. Now in high school, an old friend is talking negatively about me behind my back, and it really hurts and upsets me.

During this experience with my old friend, I wished an adult would step in to help because teachers and staff have more control over what happens at school. I thought they could have helped us talk things out and come to a mutual understanding. When you experience bullying at my school, you are encouraged to talk to the dean because the school deans have more power to handle situations for students. But the deans are very busy, so they are not always available to talk. Even when the deans are available, it often seems like they are uninterested in the conversation. When I talk to my deans, I feel like they hear me, but they don’t comprehend what I’m saying. They don’t step into my shoes to understand my feelings as a student.

This year, I had two meetings with my deans to ask for help for bullying. When I told the staff about being bullied, they told me that this is just high school life, and they didn’t take any actions to help stop the bullying. They said that “this won’t matter to me in the future,” but what I am experiencing now will affect my future. It feels like the adults invalidate our experiences as students and dismiss our feelings; even if our challenges seem small to the adults, they are big to us. We are asking our school leaders for help, and they are basically telling us to just get over it.

Our school has the core values of REACH: Respect, Effort, Accountability, Commitment, and Honesty. The teachers in my school talk about these values all the time, but it’s disappointing to see that some of the adults don’t take accountability. Despite preaching the importance of speaking out against bullying, it often feels like teachers and deans don’t want to get involved and support students when they are being bullied. They say, “we care about bullying,” but when we come to them to tell them about our experiences, it seems like they’re invalidating us.

The adults are supposed to set a good example for us as students, so I would like the adults in my school to live up to the REACH values that our school claims to set. I want them to model accountability by actively helping students who come to them for support. Our school should be a safe environment where students feel comfortable expressing themselves without fear of being invalidated or dismissed for speaking about their experiences with bullying. Everyone goes through something in life that challenges them, and it can be incredibly frustrating when the adults in the building don’t recognize those challenges. I believe it would be helpful for the adults in my school to be trained to understand that students’ emotions are valid even if our challenges may seem small to the adults. I would also like for my school to recognize that talking negatively about someone is considered bullying—bullying is not just physical violence.

I want an adult I can rely on when I experience bullying. I would have felt better if my dean really listened to me and validated my feelings by making a plan to help me to address the bullying and keeping me updated on the plan. Today I would like to ask my policymakers to help create a better system for how schools should investigate and intervene when they hear about bullying. Thank you for listening to me today. I really appreciate you taking the concerns of students seriously and working with us to create safer and more supportive schools.