Hope is a powerful solution for students

This year the Florida House will take up legislation giving parents of students who are bullied or assaulted in school an escape hatch for their children. This would come in the form of Hope Scholarships, allowing them to transfer to schools where they are safe and free to focus on their studies.

Last year, there were 47,000 incidents of violence, bullying and other abuse reported in Florida public schools.

The Tampa Bay Times laid it out in more graphic terms when describing life for students in five St. Petersburg schools the newspaper investigated in 2015.

It reported that children in these schools were “shoved, slapped, punched or kicked more than 7,500 times … the equivalent of eight times a day, every day, for five years straight.”

Yes, this is an extreme example. But the truth is we don’t really understand the full extent of the problem because there is a huge disconnect between the abuse that take place and the abuse that is reported.

Bullied children will keep quiet, either accepting it as a cruel reality of life or fearing reprisals if they speak up. There is little incentive for schools to report bullying and they can avoid it by falling back on strict interpretations of state law about what exactly meets the legal definition of bullying.

In a story this year in the Florida Times Union, Lowell Levine of the Stop Bullying Now Foundation in Lake Worth, said: “Schools today are under-reporting their bullying complaints … because they’re afraid for the image of the school and the principals are afraid for their jobs.”

A Centers for Disease Control survey reported that about 20 percent of high school students reported being bullied. According to data from Florida schools, onetenth of one percent of students are bullied.

When the South Florida Sun Sentinel reported this year that Florida schools said bullying was down, Ross Ellis, CEO of Stomp Out Bullying, a national organization, said; “I would like to say yay for all these schools, they’re so lucky that they don’t have this . ... I don’t believe that.”

I am far from alone in agreeing with him. Just ask the kids and their parents. They are the ones that understand the extent of the problem because they are living it. Put yourself in the shoes of a mother who sees her bullied child come home from school, dispirited and dreading the next day. In fact, the bullying can continue after school on social networks. And there is little you can do about it.

How does a child learn in such an environment?

I wish there was a magic law we could pass, or a surefire anti-bullying campaign that would put an end to it. That is wishful thinking.

The only recourse is giving parents the option of seeking better environments for their children if they are trapped in a hostile public school, be it a traditional one or charter. Our legislation will accomplish that by providing parents with the ability to do so, either by transferring to another public school or seeking a private option.

I have heard the teachers union and some school officials decry this as an attack on public education. That hardly is the case. We are attacking a problem that turns children into victims and parents into helpless bystanders. Perhaps those who don’t get this should spend some time with families devastated by this ongoing problem.

This legislation will give schools 15 days to resolve a complaint to the parents’ satisfaction. That timeline will require school administrators to act expeditiously on behalf of students or risk losing them. I believe the added attention this focuses on violence and bullying will by itself reduce the abuse and allow students to stay in their schools.

These kids need hope. They need to know that what is happening to them matters to all of us and that we are going to do something about it.

That is what the Hope Scholarship is all about.