Last night I attended the big City sponsored meeting at Clyde Iron in Bullying. I was late but got there in a fierce snow squall before the showing of the movie Bully began. Here’s the trailer:
We evidently were not shown the movie this trailer shows but only a portion of it. The scenes of harassment on the bus got most of the 54 people in the audience worked up as well as the ineptitude of the school administrators in targeting the bad actors. This is on the radar for the nation’s mayors although it seems more under the purview of School Administrators. Supt. Gronseth was there to follow up the Mayor’s introduction. Half the audience was composed of mental health experts or ISD 709 administrators or School Board members. That left precious few civilians to participate.
The movie was followed by forming about six tables with enough people to hold a twenty minute discussion after which one spokesman from each table summarized the twenty minuted discussion. This routine is getting a little stale for me. In the sheet of paper we were given to offer comments on the movie or our meeting I said something to the effect that it would have been helpful to have some plan of action developed to follow the movie.
Then the audience left to go back out into the cold. I gave on stranded participant a ride home and we had a pleasant conversation about politics on college campuses during the Vietnam War.
Oh at our table we had a spirited discussion about expectations of our kids. Another old coot like me said kids needed boundaries and the enforcement of them. He said that where student behavior was concerned it was all black and white and that anybody who said there was any gray was a liberal. I owned up to being a liberal and mentioned that it was hard for me to come down with no mercy on a kid with everything at home going against him. Twenty minutes was not enough to pursue this question.
