Pierce County school district responds to cyberbullying reports. ‘We need more support.’
Every so often, Peninsula School District spokesperson Danielle Chastaine opens social media, types in a few search terms, and checks to see if students in the district are being bullied online.
She handles the school district’s social media accounts. She also keeps a running list of problematic posts and accounts that are reported to her. Once she’s identified one online, she makes a report to the relevant social media company and asks them to remove it. But that’s as far as she can go. And 90 percent of the time, she says, no one responds to her request.
There’s “no customer service for Meta,” Chastaine said. “You cannot call them. You cannot talk to a real person. You can sometimes maybe find an email . . . I have tried to have profiles removed, and I cannot talk to a (real) person.”
Even if an account is deleted, a creator can simply make a new one that same day, she said.
“It feels like playing Whac-a-Mole with one player versus 200 moles,” Chastaine said.
Cyberbullying is a “national epidemic” that stretches beyond the Peninsula School District, Superintendent Krestin Bahr wrote in a Sept. 17 letter to families. The letter called out the issue and responded to complaints about cyberbullying in the district.
What has the district done so far?
The district has banned cellphones during school hours, blocked social media sites on district WiFi servers and offered parents resources on digital citizenship to curb the problem. They’ve also signed on to a lawsuit against social media companies filed by Seattle Public Schools in January 2023. More than 50 districts in Washington state and dozens more nationally have joined, KUOW reported a year after the filing.
Bahr’s letter to families Sept. 17 said that the lawsuit demands social media companies provide: “more safeguards for children and support in combating the growing mental health crisis linked to the use of their platforms.”
Having reached out to social media companies for years to get help addressing problematic content online, the district believes a lawsuit is necessary to keep the companies accountable to “change their practices of targeting minors,” district Chief of Information Kris Hagel wrote in a statement to The News Tribune.
Separate from the lawsuit, a review of the Peninsula School District’s harassment, intimidation and bullying policies led by Chief of Schools Michael Farmer is in the works, and the district is starting a bullying awareness and prevention task force led by Deputy Chief of Schools Julie Shultz-Bartlett, Bahr wrote in her letter.
At the Sept. 24 school board meeting, Farmer said the review team will present its final report to the board in December or January. They will examine incidents of harassment, bullying and discrimination in the district over the past three to four years since students returned to school during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their report will include conclusions from incident report data, interviews with students, parents, teachers and community members, and comparisons to other school districts.
Farmer’s update, which followed the Sept. 10 school board meeting where seven people spoke about the issue of cyberbullying in the district, was a follow-up to a board study session in April during which district leaders began looking at the district’s harassment, intimidation and bullying policies, Board President Natalie Wimberly said at the Sept. 24 meeting.
Meanwhile, the task force led by Deputy Chief Schultz-Bartlett is a more recent development that grew out of conversations in the last few weeks, Farmer said at the meeting. The review steering committee and the task force will work in tandem, with the task force focusing less on long-term trends and more on the immediate state of bullying in the district. The findings of the task force will also be part of the final report presented to the board in December or January.
Feet pictures, body-shaming and sex jokes
Noah Cedarland, 17, was among those who spoke about cyberbullying at the Sept. 10 school board meeting. A senior at Henderson Bay High School and student council president there, he and three of his friends came to speak after a teacher they respected was targeted online. They “decided that was the last straw,” and felt their voices would be stronger in numbers, he later told The News Tribune via email.
Cedarland attended Gig Harbor High until halfway through the 2022-23 school year, which was his sophomore year. One Instagram account he saw while attending Gig Harbor High took pictures of students’ feet while they were in the bathroom, he said at the meeting. Others would try to identify the students pictured and shame them for going to the bathroom, making Cedarland avoid going at all.
He shared six Instagram accounts with The News Tribune that he said mocked students including LGBTQ+ students and students with disabilities with demeaning captions and photos. The News Tribune observed unflattering close-up photos of students’ faces, posts criticizing students’ body types and posts with sexual jokes and coarse language on the accounts.
Eren Blake, 18, also spoke at the Sept. 10 board meeting. A graduate of Henderson Bay this spring, Blake transferred from Peninsula High in their junior year but continued to go to PHS for afternoon extracurricular activities including theater.
Blake said they were targeted in a post earlier this year that made fun of their appearance. They think the bullies picked on them because of their body type and their outfit that day, among other things.
“I’m a heavier person, and I’m also, for lack of a better term, very visibly queer,” Blake told The News Tribune via phone.
Blake decided to make the photo their profile picture and wear “it like a badge of honor.”
Though Blake was able to move on, their mom, Kim Blake, who also spoke at the Sept. 10 meeting, told The News Tribune via phone that she’s worried about the other targeted students.
The U.S. Surgeon General released an advisory in May 2023 raising concerns about the impact of social media on youth mental health. One cited study of U.S. teens ages 12 to 15 found that those who spent over three hours daily on social media were twice as likely to experience poor mental health, including depression and anxiety symptoms. A review of 36 studies also suggested a link between social media-based cyberbullying and depression in children and adolescents.
“Those kids that they’re targeting, they’re already on the outskirts,” Kim Blake said.
She was dissatisfied with the district’s explanation that they can’t remove the social media posts themselves and that they already block social media platforms on school servers. She said she wants to see the district actively going after the problematic accounts and punishing the people behind them.
Chastaine, the district spokesperson, said the district can’t share what consequences a specific student may or may not face when they’re being investigated for breaking a policy or school rule, including cyberbullying, due to federal privacy law. That can lead to the perception that the student isn’t being punished when they are, she said.
Consequences for cyberbullying can range from giving the student counseling to suspension, but it’s dealt with on a case-by-case basis, she said.
Chastaine also said it can be nearly impossible to identify those making the posts. Sometimes they can get clues about the location from the pictures and administrators will take steps to investigate further, she said.
Asked whether students are violating the cellphone ban to post photos during school, Chastaine said she couldn’t speak to that, but that it probably happens.
The ban has only been in place for two years, she said, and teachers and administrators are still working on how to best enforce it.
She acknowledged that, though the school district WiFi blocks social media, students can access the sites through their cell service. The district relies on poor cell service in some schools to act as an additional barrier.
Cedarland told The News Tribune in a follow-up email that students are definitely not posting using the school WiFi. He assumes the majority go home and post videos they took at school, unless they have good cell service during the day.
Changing the culture
Several students told The News Tribune or said at the Sept. 10 board meeting that bullying is much less of an issue at Henderson Bay High School than at Gig Harbor High or Peninsula High.
Cedarland said coming to Henderson was what showed him that bullying didn’t have to be the norm, after seeing it for years not only in the Peninsula School District but also in previous districts where he used to live.
Though sometimes there are issues with students not getting along, it doesn’t reach the level of bullying, Cedarland said. To resolve conflicts, the principal will often have students involved come into his office to work it out. That was the case when Cedarland’s own friend group was experiencing problems.
“He had us all get in a room together and talk about it,” he said. They also talked to a counselor and “were fine after that.”
Because the principal knows students individually, he can tell if a student will benefit from meeting in a group setting, Cedarland said.
Henderson Bay is a school of choice. That means that students can opt to attend there instead of their normal assigned high school. Class sizes are smaller, ranging from 15 to 20 kids per class instead of 25-plus at the other high schools, and the entire student population is 120 as opposed to 1,400, according to the school’s website.
The small class sizes allow kids to form stronger connections with the staff and teachers and to find a person they can trust if they’re going through something hard, Eren Blake told The News Tribune via phone.
At the Sept. 10 meeting, another student who spoke said they know many students have transferred to Henderson Bay because of experiences with bullying at Gig Harbor or Peninsula high schools.
Chastaine said the district is seeking to create an “environment where bullying cannot fester” at any of its schools, and where students feel empowered to step in and say: “Hey, that’s not OK,” when they see a peer being targeted. Addressing that online is another challenge.
“Once it’s outside in the metasphere, we need more support,” she said.
