Anti-bully response gets mixed reviews from Marblehead school board

MARBLEHEAD – Marblehead will be on time with its first response to the state?s new anti-bullying law – but some School Committee members expressed reservations with that law Thursday night.The committee approved anti-bullying passages for school parent handbooks after Marblehead Veterans Middle School Principal Libby Moore and school Behavior Specialist Lyn Snow assured the committee that Marblehead schools “already do these things” that the law requires.Moore and Snow said the anti-bullying policy they plan to forward to the Department of Education by Dec. 31, the state deadline, is Marblehead?s existing policy, without additions.The handbook vote means that school handbooks can be printed on time in January.However, the educators also submitted a lengthy list of procedures, and committee members Dick Nohelty and Jonathan Lederman raised questions about those.Nohelty said he and his colleagues have “zero tolerance” for bullying but the specific timing listed in the policy – “immediate” notification of parents in the event of a bullying complaint – and questions about the use the DOE may make of local records, which Marblehead must report to the state annually, concerned him.?I don?t want a bullying incident from the third grade to follow someone through their school career and their application to a state college,” he said.Superintendent of Schools Paul Dulac assured the committee that the procedures required only reasonable efforts by the staff.Moore said that only the disciplinary record is reported to the state, not individual names.Lederman said he opposed “deploying the staff into new duties outside the classroom.”Dulac told him that would not happen.The procedures were also approved as a first reading of a policy. They will have to be voted on two more times to become official.