Bullying among Kentucky middle and high school students is mostly happening face to face and not online, based on data that state education officials shared with the Kentucky Local School Board Members Advisory Council in July.
Approximately 41% of Kentucky’s public and private middle school students surveyed as part of the 2023 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Youth Risk Behavior reported being bullied in person versus 29% who reported being bullied online, state Safe and Supportive Schools branch consultant Blake Konny told the council on July 19.
In high school, 22.5% of students surveyed reported being bullied in-person versus 18.3% who said they were bullied online.
The Youth Risk Behavior survey is conducted by the center every two years among students in grades 9-12. It monitors teenage behaviors that can lead to poor health in the long run.
Although cyberbullying comes in second to in-person bullying among those students surveyed, online bullying reports have reportedly held steady. Konny said the state is seeing roughly the same number of incidents now that it saw during the pandemic.
“If it was an easy issue these numbers would be going down,” Konny said of all the bullying data. “Those numbers are very high. They’ve held consistent since the survey has been given starting in 2009-2011. So this is not a new phenomenon.”
Regarding individual bullying incidents, Konny said 19,000 incidents were reported statewide in 2022 – the most recent year that data is available.
The actual number of incidents, however, is probably much higher, he said.
“Those (19,000) are the ones we see. Bullying can be overt, it can be pushing, shoving, a fight. Those are the easy ones. Those are the 19,000. We have a ton more in the hallway (for example) that are getting overlooked,” he told the council. “So there’s a huge gap in what we’re reporting and what’s actually happening.”
For example, if 20% of the state’s more than 600,000 public school students in preschool through 12th grade are bullied one time in a given school year, the number of bullying incidents in the state rises to 120,000, said Konny – keeping in mind that elementary school incidents are not tracked by the youth survey.
In Northern Kentucky, state accountability data for the 2022-23 school year showed hundreds of incidents of harassment that “include bullying” were reported that year in the region’s largest public school districts. Assault, bringing a weapon to school, and other problem behaviors that could also involve bullying were reported separately.
Campbell County Schools had the largest percentage of reported harassment among students of the three largest NKY districts that school year with harassment incidents totaling 18.1% of all behavior events, per state data. Boone County Schools came in second with harassment incidents totaling 7% of all behavior events, while Kenton County Schools had the smallest reported percentage at 4.4%.
Julia Fischer is the vice chair of the Bellevue Independent school board and a member of the council along with at-large member Carl Wicklund, a member of the Kenton County school board. School accountability data reported Bellevue Independent had sixteen reports of harassment in the 2022-23 school year out of 224 total behavior events – or 7.1% of all events reported that year.
“So much of it starts young,” Fischer said at the July 19 meeting in response to data shared by Konny. “Learning how to get along, accepting that you did something that hurt someone and then knowing how to apologize.”
Bullying has also been tied to tragic events, including suicide.
Suicide is a leading cause of death for young people in Kentucky, according to the state, and victims can be young. In 2019, 10-year-old Seven Bridges killed himself by hanging himself in a closet in his home. His family said the Louisville 5th grader was a victim of frequent bullying at school.
Bridges’ death was the eighth student suicide in the Jefferson County Public School system at that point in the 2018-19 school year, according to NBC News. Three JCPS students had committed suicide the prior school year, said the reports.
No data on suicide among NKY school students was immediately available at the time this story was published.
The same 2023 Youth Risk Behavior survey that collected data about bullying among Kentucky school children also reported 15% of Kentucky high school students and 17.4% of Kentucky middle school students have “seriously considered” killing themselves.
Konny provided the council with suicide prevention resources from the Sources of Strength program to take back to their districts and share with their schools. Described by the state as an evidence-based model for suicide prevention, the model is focused on helping students become more resilient by tapping into their strengths.
The Kentucky Department of Education Local School Board Members Advisory Council is made up of 13 members, including six at-large members. It meets twice a year to discuss how state-level decisions are impacting school districts and boards statewide.
If you are in crisis, please call, text or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.