Franklin Ave. Middle School Earns Perfect Anti-Bullying Score

A self-assessment of efforts to prevent harassment, intimidation and bulling (HIB) in Franklin Lakes schools, presented to the board of education Tuesday night, gave the district’s middle school a perfect score.

The annual assessment, which is required under state law, scores efforts at individual schools in 25 categories on a scale from zero to three, and Franklin Avenue Middle School earned the maximum of 75 points for the 2012-13 school year.

“We did very well over the last several years in implementing a program,” the district’s anti-bullying coordinator, John Caliso, told the board.

The program he referred to is Olweus, an internationally implemented anti-bullying program named for the Norwegian psychologist that developed it.

Olweus works by integrating a “character education program” into the schools’ curriculum to “create a culture using the language and concepts” of anti-bullying, Superintendent Frank Romano said.

Anti-bullying efforts in the schools also include workshops and training sessions for guidance counselors and administrators on bullying and suicide prevention, according to the presentation.

“We’ve been actively involved in doing these programs and alerting our staff, training our staff to be much more sensitive...in terms of trying to understand the conditions as well as the symptoms of anything that looks like an HIB case,” Caliso said.

The district’s elementary schools also earned high scores in the assessment, each coming in with 72 points, Caliso said. He noted that in 22 of the categories the schools had exceeded state requirements.

“We have a unified program throughout the district at this point,” Caliso said, adding that the anti-bullying specialists in each of the buildings coordinate regularly to maintain the uniform reporting and investigation procedures required by the state.

Romano said that the past school year was the first in which the program was implemented in the elementary schools, and that he expects that each of the schools will also attain the perfect score by next year.