Along with Carl Walker-Hoover, an 11-year-old Springfield student who also hanged himself after being bullied at school, Prince became the face of the anti-bullying movement.
Phoebe PrinceFor months, the New England chapter of Anti-Defamation League had been trying to get Massachusetts officials to look at its model legislation for addressing the issue of school bullying.
As Regional Director Derrek L. Shulman recalls, it was slow going.
“It was hard to get people’s attention at the State House,” he said.
That changed fast after Jan. 14, 2010. Locally, many will remember that date sadly as the day when Phoebe Prince, a 15-year-old freshman at South Hadley High School, took her life after being bullied in school.
It is Prince’s legacy, however, that others will mark it as the day the tide turned in the fight against bullying.
“After that, people were calling us,” Shulman said.
The Anti-Defamation League had been focused on the issue for a long time, identifying it as a key to educating the public on a range of discrimination matters.
“Regarding safety and respect and where people learn how to respond to prejudice, they learn it at schools,” Shulman said.
The League had painstakingly built a coalition of like-minded groups to help it push the legislation.
After news of Prince’s tragedy broke, police unions, gay and lesbian organizations and an array of others joined in.
“The size of the coalition exploded overnight,” he said.
Carl Walker-HooverAlong with Carl Walker-Hoover, an 11-year-old Springfield student who also hanged himself after being bullied at school, Prince became the face of the anti-bullying movement.
In Massachusetts, that movement culminated last May when Gov. Deval L. Patrick signed into law what some have called the most comprehensive anti-bullying bill in the country.
Tragic as their deaths were, Shulman said the impact of the Phoebe Prince and Carl Walker-Hoover stories cannot be overestimated.
“For the first time in our history, a bright spotlight shined on the destructive impact of bullying,” he said.
The state law mandated that every school system in Massachusetts devise its own plan to deal with bullying. It also served as a template for those plans.
In no community did the legislation hit home more than in South Hadley, where 350 people showed up for the initial meeting of a newly formed Anti-Bullying Task Force.
“It was unprecedented,” said School Superintendent Gus A. Sayer. “While our plan probably doesn’t look all that different from many plans around the state, it came from a tremendous number of people in the community.”
A chapter in the Phoebe Prince saga closed last week as five of six former classmates charged in connection with her treatment resolved their cases in court. The charge against the sixth was dismissed.
None of the five teens appearing in court last week was sentenced to jail, but all will undergo a period of probation that requires community service. In what was perhaps a greater punishment, all six had to undergo a year of public scrutiny in which they were subjected to withering criticism.
Sayer said the tension at South Hadley High School eased somewhat with those resolutions.
“Throughout the year, people were wondering what was going to happen,” he said. “I think now we can move forward more clearly.”
As a result of the Prince tragedy, Sayer believes there has been a significant increase in student awareness of bullying. The public dialogue in the wake of her death has also forced the schools to clarify aspects of their own policy that had been ambiguous.
“Because of the national attention, there are indications that the behavior in our schools has improved this year,” Sayer said.
Critics of the South Hadley school administration still insist, however, that it needs to examine its own role in the Prince tragedy. Although no school officials were ever charged with a crime in connection with Prince’s bullying, both former Northwestern District Attorney Elizabeth D. Scheibel and her successor, David E. Sullivan, have expressed concerns about the way they handled the matter.
Darby O’Brien, the owner of a local public relations firm and a long-time critic of the South Hadley school system, said the adults must set the example for the students.
Darby O'Brien“If you don’t hold the professionals responsible, how do you expect the kids to do the right thing?” he asked.
O’Brien said he has received calls for help from people in other communities, and there is a common theme.
“The constant is that school officials look the other way,” he said.
Although O’Brien agrees that Prince’s death has greatly affected the discussion surrounding school bullying, he said it remains to be seen if it will percolate up to the top and galvanize school officials to take more aggressive action.
“Will they take it seriously?” he asked. “It’s definitely generated a lot of attention. I don’t know.”
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