It isn’t clear why Victoria Pabst didn’t get the help she needed. What is clear is that school felt like a very unsettling and unsafe place to her, and that the policies and procedures in place were not enough to set it right.

That should be a lesson for all schools as they deal with bullying made infinitely more intense by technology.

Pabst, a 16-year-old junior at Westbrook High School, said for most of the school year she has been the subject of unrelenting threats and taunts from a fellow group of students. She believed her complaints to the administration were not being taken seriously, and decided to write down her experiences in a letter.

“The most dangerous place you feel is at school,” Pabst wrote in her letter, which was later posted on the website of local radio talk show host Ray Richardson, a family friend. “You know the bathroom stalls like the back of your hand because you leave each and every class to cry and let the feelings they caused, out. This place is just for education right? Its 2:05, the bell rings, finally time to go home and get away from all of this. You get home and your phone goes off. It hasn’t stopped. To be honest, it’s just begun. You get tweets, chats, text messages and it all hurts.”

Principal Thomas O’Malley said he learned of the letter last Tuesday and was working to resolve the situation. Superintendent Marc Gousse said bullying and harassment are not tolerated at Westbrook, and that he is confident the situation was handled correctly.

This is not a story that reflects well on Westbrook, and though Pabst does say some people at the school, including a counselor, have treated her very well, it would be easy for school officials to see Pabst’s letter and the subsequent news articles as an attack on the school, and to let that color their response.

But Victoria Pabst’s story is not unique – and this is not just a Westbrook story. In fact, it is being played out at schools across the country, sometimes to tragic results. Westbrook is just the latest school to publicly deal with bullying. It will not be the last.

It is important that schools understand the full scope of the problem. The social circle of a high school student now extends to Facebook and Twitter, where bullying is an almost effort-free endeavor. Piling on has never been so easy, and now it can occur around the clock.

That kind of harassment is incredibly isolating, in a way that teenage bullying has never been before, and perhaps schools are not as prepared to confront it as they need to be. If the proper policies were followed in Pabst’s case and she still felt alone and unsafe at school, what does that say?

That is a question school officials everywhere should be asking.

Ben Bragdon is the managing editor of Current Publishing. He can be reached at bbragdon@keepmecurrent.com or followed on Twitter.

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