With the new year came new changes to the Capistrano Unified School District bullying policy. The District’s Board has decided that the Conduct policy, which discusses bullying, will be revised and split into one policy that focuses on conduct, and another that discusses bullying primarily.

The Conduct policy was last updated in February of 2012. Among other behavioral matters, the current District Conduct policy defines bullying and cyber bullying, identifies the responsibilities of all stakeholders to prevent bullying, and explains the complaint procedure to report bullying.

In order to make a more comprehensive policy that expresses the District’s stance on bullying specifically, the board has proposed Board Policy 5131.2, Bullying. This would allow for the large, sometimes confusing, Conduct policy to be reduced.

The staff has already updated the Conduct policy by removing the language regarding bullying so that it could be placed in a separate policy.

The new policy will focus on student behavior specifically. It will also include material on bullying prevention as well as the training and reporting procedure for staff members.

A new, prominent concept being introduced in the Bullying policy is bullying done by students to anyone on campus. Essentially, this extends the material on those being bullied from not only students, but to employees as well. The bullying of any adults at school will be considered in this policy.

The new policy has been reviewed by Trustees so it can become a separate Board item, however, it was decided at the February 24 board meeting that revisions must be made due to both problems with structure and content found in the policy by board members.

Though the new policy was not passed, the Board plans to revise the material for now and circle back to it in the near future.