Springfield suicide prompts discussion of school harassment at legislative briefing

The suicide of an 11-year-old Springfield boy last week provided a stark reminder of the consequences of bullying and harassment during an April 14 legislative briefing by the Massachusetts Commission on GLBT Youth.

The commission had invited lawmakers to hear testimony from three young people about their own experiences dealing with anti-LGBT harassment and violence at school and at home, but commission Vice-Chair Eleni Carr led off the briefing by talking about Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover's death. Walker-Hoover hanged himself with an extension cord in his family's home April 6, and his mother, Sirdeaner Walker, has said she believes he was driven to kill himself by the relentless bullying he endured at school. Walker said that other students called him gay, insulted his clothes and threatened him on a regular basis.

"This is a boy who was not gay-identified but had been the recipient of multiple taunts and bullying and gay epithets and comments around his gender expression. He was 11 years old and yesterday he was buried," Carr told the crowd, which included about 20 lawmakers and several members of the commission. "This is the very reason the commission exists. This is exactly what we're trying to address: making schools safe, making communities safe and creating the environments where kids can live, learn and play. We like to think there are times we are doing a good job, but evidence like last week's tragedy suggests it's not good enough."

State Sen. Anthony Galluccio (D-Cambridge), who attended the briefing, said he traveled to Springfield to attend Walker-Hoover's April 13 memorial service. He told the attendees at the briefing that while he is unfamiliar with many of the specifics of the incident, he believes Walker-Hoover's suicide raises questions about how the school responded to bullying.

"Were teachers in that school, administrators, equipped to deal with this stuff? ... You have to let the dust settle, see how the mother wants to handle it, but I have deep concerns about how this went down in the school. This kid was into everything; he was not a deprived child in the sense that his mother had him in every conceivable program. And the other piece is all reports are he was the happiest kid. So there's this happy exterior with so much else going on, the mother knows what's going on, and I just think it could be very pivotal in how we deal with that," said Galluccio.

Carr said lawmakers need to respond to Walker-Hoover's death and to bullying more broadly by passing strong anti-bullying and school safety laws, and those laws need to explicitly protect LGBT youth.

"Social change to my mind begins with laws, and we have to actually enumerate and explicitly identify gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth in our legislation. The absence of that black and white wording in the legislation is a contributing factor to the failure of social change to occur," said Carr.

Walker-Hoover's death has made headlines throughout Massachusetts. Despite the fact that he did not publicly identify as gay his story has also garnered coverage in national LGBT media. Both his mother and officials at his school, Springfield's New Leadership Charter School, say he was a regular target of bullies, but the extent of the actions school officials took to intervene in the situation remains unclear. Peter Daboul, chair of the school's board of trustees, said school officials are currently reviewing all of their records relating to Walker-Hoover. He said the bullying largely consisted of verbal harassment, and it began not long after Walker-Hoover entered the school in September; this was Walker-Hoover's first year at New Leadership Charter School, a Horace Mann charter school.

"The school was involved in trying to mediate the situation any time a situation occurred. They were not only involved but they were taking actions to try to correct the situation," said Daboul. He said students who bullied Walker-Hoover were formally disciplined, and Walker-Hoover was meeting regularly with the school psychologist. Daboul said the psychologist was involved in the decision to require Walker-Hoover and a female student who had verbally harassed him to eat lunch together for a week. His mother, who did not respond to requests to comment for this story, has told media outlets that she believes this remedy may have exacerbated Walker-Hoover's trauma and precipitated his decision to kill himself. She has pledged to file a complaint with the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

Daboul said the school, which as a charter school has more leeway to set policy than a standard public school, uses a modified version of Springfield's anti-bullying policies and requires all students to sign a statement pledging to treat their peers with respect. The anti-bullying policy does not include any specific language around anti-LGBT insults, but Daboul said it prohibits all malicious name-calling.

"As you know know, insults can come in any way shape or form. I don't think it tries to categorize them. ... Any name you call to try to incite anger is really not acceptable," said Daboul.

He said the teachers and administrators receive training in responding to bullying. If the school finds that the policies fell short in responding to Walker-Hoover's case Daboul said the school would consider changing them to make them more effective.

"We're looking at the records, the phone logs, so we'll have an accurate picture based on the data that's been gathered. ... If we find that there were ways to improve we obviously will do that," said Daboul.

Walker-Hoover's suicide comes at a time when anti-bullying advocates are preparing to make a strong push for statewide anti-bullying legislation that would require every school district in the state to adopt a formal anti-bullying policy. Anti-Defamation League (ADL) civil rights counsel Robert Trestan said that while Walker-Hoover's decision to take his own life was horrific, it was also a familiar scenario to those advocating for bullying prevention measures. ADL is one of the lead advocacy groups in the coalition to pass the anti-bullying bill. Trestan said research has shown that children who are bullied are more likely to think about suicide, to be depressed, lonely, anxious or unwell, and to have low self-esteem. ADL said as part of the campaign to pass the anti-bullying bill the organization will work to raise awareness about the horrific consequences that bullying can have on the health and safety of students and the community at large.

"I think it's just as important for civil rights groups and anti-bullying groups to be interested in this bill as district attorneys and police officers and educators, because the impact of bullying in schools intersects with all aspects of society. ... ADL nationally, we've recognized this as a national problem. Springfield is not the only place where there's been a tragedy," said Trestan, who said the bill, House Bill 483, is based on ADL's national model legislation.

Don Gorton, chair of the Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project, which is also part of the coalition working to pass the legislation, said targets of bullying frequently either turn their anger inward, as Walker-Hoover did, or outward against their fellow students or others. Gorton said incidents like Walker-Hoover's death point to the need for the state to adopt a comprehensive approach to confronting bullying.

"It's hardly a newsflash to anyone. We've been talking about this for years. Bullying kills. Now this is the more familiar pattern we've seen, which is a target is traumatized by the experience of bullying and turns it within and kills himself. ... But bullying also leads to homicide," said Gorton. "Either way bullying is a public safety hazard."

H.B. 483 is one of several similar anti-bullying bills filed this session. State Rep. John Rogers (D-Norwood), the lead sponsor of H.B. 483, said he would work with the Joint Committee on Education, which will hold a hearing on the bill at an as-yet undetermined date later this session, and the committee's chairs and the other bills' sponsors to arrive at a version of the bill that they can all support. Rogers said he has been involved in efforts to pass legislation for the last several years, and he believes he and other advocates for the legislation have made substantial progress in educating the legislature on the issues surrounding bullying.

"We think the bill made a lot of progress last year and raised the level of awareness, certainly at the State House, that there is a need for a consistent public policy on the prevention of bullying in our school systems," said Rogers.

The ADL bullying bill covers a wide range of bullying behavior, including cyber-bullying, but it does not include language specifying that it covers bullying targeting different identities based on sexual orientation, gender identity, race, gender, or other categories commonly found in legislation dealing with discrimination or hate crimes.

Jacob Smith Yang, chair of the Massachusetts Commission on GLBT Youth, said the commission has requested copies of all the bills to review them, but the commission hopes that the final version of the bill includes specific references to sexual orientation and gender identity.

"Obviously we would like to see enumeration in any measure moving forward," said Yang.

Rogers said that he would be open to modifying the bill, but he believes the goal of the current language is to cover any form or bullying regardless of the identity of the victim.

"I would not certainly be averse to any suggestions to modifications to the bill. I do think the idea was to put all students on equal footing, so of course if a student is harassed or intimidated on the basis of one's gender or orientation or race, that would be covered by the current draft. But sometimes children are just different, and their differing traits are not distinguishable along the lines of race or orientation or ethnicity, and these children should be protected equally as well as any child discriminated against on the basis of innate qualities," said Rogers. "We want to be expansive and make sure that this catches all types of would-be victims."