For parents, back to school is an exciting time. But for many students, the dread of heading back to the classroom is about more than just the end of summer freedom.

Bullying, harassment, and sexual harassment account for hundreds of missed school days each year in Maine. Making sure our students are safe and have every opportunity to succeed is a prominent area of concern in our schools. We are lucky in Gray and Windham that we have schools with caring faculty and administrators that already work hard to create a respectful learning environment, but this is not the case in every school in Maine.

During the first part of the legislative session, the Education Committee made improving our school climates a top priority, and I cosponsored legislation that works hard to meet the needs of students, teachers, and parents. This new law goes into effect this fall and asks that schools and school boards to revise their policies on these behaviors to ensure that we’re doing everything we can to help our children grow and thrive in the classroom.

But schools and school boards won’t have to go it alone in reviewing their policies, many of which are outdated. As a part of the new law, the Maine Children’s Cabinet – a group of parents, teachers, guidance counselors and child advocates – has spent the last year cataloging best practices from Maine and around the country to create model policies.

The group has also developed a series of training programs for teachers and support staff, built a Web site with resources for parents, students, and teachers, and organized workshops statewide to better educate faculty and administrators on what can be done to support our children. I’ve seen their guidebook, and it shows a lot of consideration about both helping students who have been bullied, and teaching aggressive students to understand the serious consequences of their actions.

Schools will still have the freedom to craft policies that best meet the needs of their students, but armed with ongoing resources that reflects everything the experts have learned over the years about how to combat these behaviors, and the subsequent problems they create for our schools.

My wife and I have three sons who have all graduated now from high school, and one finished with college already. As parents, we know that the environment that our kids learned in made a difference to their success as students. When kids are happy and feel good about going to school, their grades generally reflect what their day-to-day classroom experience is like.

As a father, I’m not going to pretend that bullying in our schools is going to go away overnight, or that writing a new policy is a magic bullet for fixing these problems our students face. But I do know that it’s tough to be a kid, especially these days, and we have to try harder to improve our school climates to give every student an opportunity to meet their full potential.

In the meantime, I hope you will contact me if I may be of assistance on any state issue. Please feel free to call me at home at 892-6591, or send me an e-mail at [email protected].

Rep. Mark Bryant

Parts of Windham, Gray