Bullying Law Puts New Jersey Schools on Spot

By WINNIE HU - The New York Times - August 30, 2011

Under a new state law in New Jersey, lunch-line bullies in the East Hanover schools can be reported to the police by their classmates this fall through anonymous tips to the Crimestoppers hot line.

In Elizabeth, children, including kindergartners, will spend six class periods learning, among other things, the difference between telling and tattling.

And at North Hunterdon High School, students will be told that there is no such thing as an innocent bystander when it comes to bullying: if they see it, they have a responsibility to try to stop it.

But while many parents and educators welcome the efforts to curb bullying both on campus and online, some superintendents and school board members across New Jersey say the new law, which takes effect Sept. 1, reaches much too far, and complain that they have been given no additional resources to meet its mandates.

The law, known as the Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights, is considered the toughest legislation against bullying in the nation. Propelled by public outcry over the suicide of a Rutgers University freshman, Tyler Clementi, nearly a year ago, it demands that all public schools adopt comprehensive antibullying policies (there are 18 pages of “required components”), increase staff training and adhere to tight deadlines for reporting episodes.

Each school must designate an antibullying specialist to investigate complaints; each district must, in turn, have an antibullying coordinator; and the State Education Department will evaluate every effort, posting grades on its Web site. Superintendents said that educators who failed to comply could lose their licenses.

“I think this has gone well overboard,” Richard G. Bozza, executive director of the New Jersey Association of School Administrators, said. “Now we have to police the community 24 hours a day. Where are the people and the resources to do this?”

In most cases, schools are tapping guidance counselors and social workers as the new antibullying specialists, raising questions of whether they have the time or experience to look into every complaint of harassment or intimidation and write the detailed reports required. Some administrators are also worried that making schools legally responsible for bullying on a wider scale will lead to more complaints and open the door to lawsuits from students and parents dissatisfied with the outcome.

But supporters of the law say that schools need to do more as conflicts spread from cafeterias and corridors to social media sites, magnifying the effects and making them much harder to shut down. Mr. Clementi jumped off the George Washington Bridge after his college roommate secretly used a webcam to capture an intimate encounter between Mr. Clementi and another man and stream it over the Internet, according to the police.

“It’s not the traditional bullying: the big kid in the schoolyard saying, ‘You’re going to do what I say,’ ” Richard Bergacs, an assistant principal at North Hunterdon High, said.

Dr. Bergacs, who investigates half a dozen complaints of bullying each month, said most involved both comments on the Internet and face-to-face confrontations on campus. “It’s gossip, innuendo, rumors — and people getting mad about it,” he said.

This summer, thousands of school employees attended training sessions on the new law; more than 200 districts have snapped up a $1,295 package put together by a consulting firm that includes a 100-page manual and a DVD.

At a three-hour workshop this month, Philip W. Nicastro, vice president of the firm, Strauss Esmay Associates, tried to reassure a group of newly named antibullying specialists and coordinators gathered in a darkened auditorium at Bridgewater-Raritan High School.

“I know many of you came in here saying, ‘Holy cow, I’m going to be dealing with 10 reports a day because everything is bullying,’ ” he told the audience, some of whom laughed nervously.

Afterward, Meg Duffy, a counselor at the Hillside Intermediate School in Bridgewater, acknowledged that the new law was “a little overwhelming.” She said cyberbullying increased at her school last year, with students texting or posting mean messages about classmates.

The law also requires districts to appoint a safety team at each school, made up of teachers, staff members and parents, to review complaints. It orders principals to begin an investigation within one school day of a bullying episode, and superintendents to provide reports to Trenton twice a year detailing all episodes. Statewide, there were 2,846 such reports in 2008-9, the most recent year for which a total was available.

In the East Hanover district, the new partnership with Crimestoppers, a program of the Morris County sheriff’s office, is intended to make reporting easier, but it also ups the ante by involving law enforcement rather than resolving issues in the principal’s office. Crimestoppers will accept anonymous text messages, calls or tips to its Web site, then forward the information to school and local police officials.

The district is also spending $3,000 to expand antibullying training to most of its staff, including substitute teachers, coaches, custodians and cafeteria aides. It is also planning its first Community Night of Respect for students and parents in October.

“We really want to be able to implement this new law and achieve results,” the district’s superintendent, Joseph L. Ricca, said, though he added that the law’s “sheer scope may prove to be a bit unwieldy and may require some practical refinement.”

In Elizabeth, antibullying efforts will start in the classroom, with a series of posters and programs, including role-playing exercises. In one lesson, students will study pictures of children’s faces and talk about the emotions expressed (annoyance, disappointment), while in another, they will practice saying phrases like “I am angry.”

“The whole push is to incorporate the antibullying process into the culture,” Lucila Hernandez, a school psychologist, said. “We’re empowering children to use the term ‘bullying’ and to speak up for themselves and for others.”

Even districts that have long made antibullying programs a priority are preparing to step up their efforts, in response to the greater reporting demands. “This gives a definite timeline,” the Westfield superintendent, Margaret Dolan, said, noting the new one-day requirement. “Before, our rule was you need to do it as quickly as possible.”

But Dr. Dolan cautioned that an unintended consequence of the new law could be that students, or their parents, will find it easier to label minor squabbles bullying than to find ways to work out their differences.

“Kids have to learn to deal with conflict,” she said. “What a shame if they don’t know how to effectively interact with their peers when they have a disagreement.”

Sound of Post-Soviet Protest: Claps and Beeps

By ELLEN BARRY - July 14, 2011 - The New York Times

MINSK, Belarus — At the time appointed for Wednesday evening’s antigovernment protest here in the capital of Belarus, scores of burly plainclothes officers were waiting in Yakub Kolas Square. Their job was to prevent it from happening.

But it was difficult for them to know who, among the skateboarders, young urban professionals and stolid-looking grandmothers, was taking part. The park benches filled up, and then the stone curbs, but the activists — following instructions posted on an Internet site — were not actually doing anything.

At 8 p.m., their phones buzzed or beeped or played music.

That was the whole protest. Plainclothes officers with camcorders meticulously filmed the face of every person in the park and forced a few demonstrators, struggling and shouting, into buses. But the sixth of the weekly “clapping protests” had eliminated clapping, which presented both the police and activists with some tough questions.

Can you really detain people because their phones are beeping?

And when you cannot tell who is protesting, is it still a protest?

Street politics have lost their relevance in many former Soviet countries, as the political opposition has withered away. But innovative forms of protest are popping up. None of them has managed to mobilize large numbers or pose any real threat to the ruling elites. They do, however, attract young people in free-form, often social-media-directed alternatives to the picketing and chants their elders employ. And the participants are proving very difficult to punish.

Russia has the “blue buckets,” activists who affix plastic sand toys to their cars (or their heads) in a protest against the traffic privileges accorded to government officials, whose cars are equipped with flashing blue lights. In Azerbaijan, where protesters are hustled away so quickly that even gathering is nearly impossible, small flash mobs have appeared out of nowhere to perform sword fights or folk dances.

The more permissive political atmosphere of Ukraine has spawned Femen, a group of young women who address such nonsexy issues as pension reform by baring their breasts in public. A woman was arrested in April for walking up to a World War II memorial in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, and frying eggs and sausages over the eternal flame.

Social scientists refer to these as “dilemma actions,” because they force the authorities to choose between two equally distasteful alternatives: to stand back and allow such activities to continue, taking the risk that they will build into something significant; or to impose harsh punishment on people who are engaged in a seemingly benign activity.

The latter route can result in a public backlash, as when Azerbaijan imposed two-year prison sentences on the so-called donkey bloggers, or when Russian authorities prosecuted Voina, a radical art collective best known for painting a 210-foot penis on a St. Petersburg drawbridge.

Belarus has opted to take a hard line. About 1,830 people have been detained by the police since June, when a small group of activists living in exile initiated the clapping protests, said Tatyana Revyako, who works for Vyasna, a human rights group. Upward of 500 people have received sentences of 5 to 15 days, she said.

The crackdown has generated a good deal of absurdity. As Belarus’s July 3 Independence Day holiday approached, the Minsk police chief, Igor Yevseyev, called a news conference and announced that citizens would not be punished for applauding soldiers or veterans. One of the people convicted of taking part in a clapping protest that day was Konstantin Kaplin, 36, who argued in court that contrary to the testimony of a police officer, he could not have been applauding because he has only one arm.

Another was Galina A. Goncharik, a diminutive woman of 68, who last week shared, with clear delight, the findings of a Minsk judge after she was detained for clapping on July 3. Ms. Goncharik, the decision said, “loudly expressed rude and uncensored profanity, waved her hands, acted provocatively, did not react to clear instructions, knowingly violated public order, the civil peace, expressing clear lack of respect for society.”

Her prosecution, she said, has shocked even relatives and neighbors who were stalwart supporters of the government.

“Everyone just laughed” when they heard the charges, said Ms. Goncharik, who was convicted during a 10-minute trial and paid a fine of about $175. “They said, ‘Have they gone completely crazy?’ ”

A spokesman for the Belarus Interior Ministry, Konstantin Shalkevich, would not say how many people had been detained on Wednesday, saying Belarussian law allows the police to detain any citizen for three hours without providing a reason. From the standpoint of the police, he said, the protesters’ tactics are irrelevant.

“Whether it’s clapping, or ringing telephones or any other action is all the same,” Mr. Shalkevich said. “Any activity being organized in Minsk is an activity of mass disorder. The people who organize it are located far from the territory of Belarus.”

He added: “We have the power and the means to guarantee order in Minsk, and we will guarantee order. That is my commentary.”

The arrests have had a powerful chilling effect. For this reason, the protest’s organizers changed their tactics this week, instructing participants not to clap their hands, but instead to set the alarms on their cellphones for 8 p.m.

The “alarm clock action,” as some have dubbed it, sought to minimize arrests, and in that sense, it worked. But at 8 p.m. the cellphone alarms were barely audible over the noise of passing traffic, and by the time they went silent — about a minute later — it hardly felt as if anything had taken place.

Olga Tatarinova, a 23-year-old journalist, was disappointed. She had come to the square prepared to risk arrest. She said she clapped with her feet, but no one heard her.

“Everyone is afraid,” said a 27-year-old man who said his name was Maksim Pulsov, and who occasionally pulled a checked scarf over his face. “We need some training in not being afraid.”

On the edges of the square, people were coming and going, some on their way home from work. Belarus is in the grip of a financial crisis, partly because of the Soviet-style economic policies of President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko. In power since 1994, Mr. Lukashenko has tried to shore up his popularity by raising wages and providing low-interest loans. This led to a steep devaluation of the Belarussian ruble; people then began hoarding food staples and lining up to convert their assets into hard currency.

But summer is a sleepy season, when much of the population disappears to cabins in the woods. The clapping protests have not attracted much support from the general public or, critically, from the factory workers who make up a crucial political constituency. This is in part because the young organizers are not offering remedies to mounting social problems, said Anatoly V. Lebedko, an opposition leader who spent four months in prison for participating in demonstrations after last December’s presidential election.

“These young people, they want more freedom, but that’s not going to convince people in the tractor factories,” Mr. Lebedko said. “We have to come up with some answers to the question: What is to be done?”

New York Allows Same-Sex Marriage, Becoming Largest State to Pass Law

- By MICHAEL BARBARO - June 24, 2011 - The New York Times

ALBANY — Lawmakers voted late Friday to legalize same-sex marriage, making New York the largest state where gay and lesbian couples will be able to wed and giving the national gay-rights movement new momentum from the state where it was born.

The marriage bill, whose fate was uncertain until moments before the vote, was approved 33 to 29 in a packed but hushed Senate chamber. Four members of the Republican majority joined all but one Democrat in the Senate in supporting the measure after an intense and emotional campaign aimed at the handful of lawmakers wrestling with a decision that divided their friends, their constituents and sometimes their own homes.

With his position still undeclared, Senator Mark J. Grisanti, a Republican from Buffalo who had sought office promising to oppose same-sex marriage, told his colleagues he had agonized for months before concluding he had been wrong.

“I apologize for those who feel offended,” Mr. Grisanti said, adding, “I cannot deny a person, a human being, a taxpayer, a worker, the people of my district and across this state, the State of New York, and those people who make this the great state that it is the same rights that I have with my wife.”

Senate approval was the final hurdle for the same-sex marriage legislation, which was approved last week by the Assembly. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed the measure at 11:55 p.m., and the law will go into effect in 30 days, meaning that same-sex couples could begin marrying in New York by late July.

Passage of same-sex marriage here followed a daunting run of defeats in other states where voters barred same-sex marriage by legislative action, constitutional amendment or referendum. Just five states currently permit same-sex marriage: Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont, as well as the District of Columbia.

At around 10:30 p.m., moments after the vote was announced, Mr. Cuomo strode onto the Senate floor to wave at cheering supporters who had crowded into the galleries to watch. Trailed by two of his daughters, the governor greeted lawmakers, and paused to single out those Republicans who had defied the majority of their party to support the marriage bill.

“How do you feel?” he asked Senator James S. Alesi, a suburban Rochester Republican who voted against the measure in 2009 and was the first to break party ranks this year. “Feels good, doesn’t it?”

The approval of same-sex marriage represented a reversal of fortune for gay-rights advocates, who just two years ago suffered a humiliating defeat when a same-sex marriage bill was easily rejected by the Senate, which was then controlled by Democrats. This year, with the Senate controlled by Republicans, the odds against passage of same-sex marriage appeared long.

But the unexpected victory had a clear champion: Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat who pledged last year to support same-sex marriage but whose early months in office were dominated by intense battles with lawmakers and some labor unions over spending cuts.

Mr. Cuomo made same-sex marriage one of his top priorities for the year and deployed his top aide to coordinate the efforts of a half-dozen local gay-rights organizations whose feuding and disorganization had in part been blamed for the defeat two years ago.

The new coalition of same-sex marriage supporters brought in one of Mr. Cuomo’s trusted campaign operatives to supervise a $3 million television and radio campaign aimed at persuading several Republican and Democratic senators to drop their opposition.

For Senate Republicans, even bringing the measure to the floor was a freighted decision. Most of the Republicans firmly oppose same-sex marriage on moral grounds, and many of them also had political concerns, fearing that allowing same-sex marriage to pass on their watch would embitter conservative voters and cost the Republicans their one-seat majority in the Senate.

Leaders of the state’s Conservative Party, whose support many Republican lawmakers depend on to win election, warned that they would oppose in legislative elections next year any Republican senator who voted for same-sex marriage.

But after days of contentious discussion capped by a marathon nine-hour closed-door debate on Friday, Republicans came to a fateful decision: The full Senate would be allowed to vote on the bill, the majority leader, Dean G. Skelos, said Friday afternoon, and each member would be left to vote according to his or her conscience.

“The days of just bottling up things, and using these as excuses not to have votes — as far as I’m concerned as leader, it’s over with,” said Mr. Skelos, a Long Island Republican who voted against the bill.

Just before the marriage vote, lawmakers in the Senate and Assembly approved a broad package of major legislation that constituted the remainder of their agenda for the year. The bills included a cap on local property tax increases and a strengthening of New York’s rent regulation laws, as well as a five-year tuition increase at the State University of New York and the City University of New York.

But Republican lawmakers spent much of the week negotiating changes to the marriage bill to protect religious institutions, especially those that oppose same-sex weddings. On Friday, the Assembly and the Senate approved those changes. But they were not enough to satisfy the measure’s staunchest opponents. In a joint statement, New York’s Catholic bishops assailed the vote.

“The passage by the Legislature of a bill to alter radically and forever humanity’s historic understanding of marriage leaves us deeply disappointed and troubled,” the bishops said.

Besides Mr. Alesi and Mr. Grisanti, the four Republicans who voted for the measure included Senators Stephen M. Saland from the Hudson Valley area and Roy J. McDonald of the capital region.

Just one lawmaker rose to speak against the bill: Rubén Díaz Sr. of the Bronx, the only Democratic senator to cast a no vote. Mr. Díaz, saying he was offended by the two-minute restrictions set on speeches, repeatedly interrupted the presiding officer who tried to limit the senator’s remarks, shouting, “You don’t want to hear me.”

“God, not Albany, has settled the definition of marriage, a long time ago,” Mr. Díaz said.

The legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States is a relatively recent goal of the gay-rights movement, but over the last few years, gay-rights organizers have placed it at the center of their agenda, steering money and muscle into dozens of state capitals in an often uphill effort to persuade lawmakers.

In New York, passage of the bill reflects rapidly evolving sentiment about same-sex unions. In 2004, according to a Quinnipiac poll, 37 percent of the state’s residents supported allowing same-sex couples to wed. This year, 58 percent of them did. Advocates moved aggressively this year to capitalize on that shift, flooding the district offices of wavering lawmakers with phone calls, e-mails and signed postcards from constituents who favored same-sex marriage, sometimes in bundles that numbered in the thousands.

Dozens more states have laws or constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage. Many of them were approved in the past few years, as same-sex marriage moved to the front line of the culture war and politicians deployed the issue as a tool for energizing their base.

But New York could be a shift: It is now by far the largest state to grant legal recognition to same-sex weddings, and one that is home to a large, visible and politically influential gay community. Supporters of the measure described the victory in New York as especially symbolic — and poignant — because of its rich place in the history of gay rights: the movement’s foundational moment, in June 1969, was a riot against police at the Stonewall Inn, a bar in the West Village.

In Albany, there was elation after the vote. But leading up to it, there were moments of tension and frustration. At one point, Senator Kevin S. Parker, a Brooklyn Democrat, erupted when he and other supporters learned they would not be allowed to make a floor speech.

“This is not right,” he yelled, before storming from the chamber.

During a brief recess during the voting, Senator Shirley L. Huntley, a Queens Democrat who had only recently come out in support of same sex marriage, strode from her seat to the back of the Senate chamber to congratulate Daniel J. O’Donnell, an openly gay Manhattan lawmaker who sponsored the legislation in the Assembly.

They hugged, and Assemblyman O’Donnell, standing with his longtime partner, began to tear up.

“We’re going to invite you to our wedding,” Mr. O’Donnell said. “Now we have to figure out how to pay for one.”

Danny Hakim and Thomas Kaplan contributed reporting from Albany, and Adriane Quinlan from New York.