Stop Bullying Louisiana and Equality Louisiana released an online petition earlier this month to support the 2012 Louisiana School Bullying Prevention Act.
The bill addresses bullying against students with disabilities, students who are not native English speakers and LGBT students in public schools. It will be up for debate in this spring’s legislative session, which begins March 12.
Equality Louisiana is an organization dedicated to achieving full equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, and Stop Bullying Louisiana is a coalition group formed around anti-bullying legislative efforts in Louisiana.
Matthew Patterson, a physics graduate student who works with Equality Louisiana, said a bill similar to the 2012 Louisiana School Bullying Prevention Act was discussed last year, but new additions, including specific definitions for terms in the bill, have been integrated.
Last year’s bill didn’t pass. Patterson said the bill “included students with disabilities, but it wasn’t specific.”
“It banned bullying or harassment based on ‘mental or physical disabilities,'” he said. “This year, we have worked with various disability advocacy groups on better language, and our draft explicitly mentions bullying based on ‘mental illness or emotional health disorder, physical disability, intellectual disability, developmental disability’ and other characteristics.”
People who signed the petition supporting the bill agreed to ask the “Louisiana House of Representatives and Senate [to] pass the School Bullying Prevention Act of 2012 and that the governor sign the act into law.”
While individual signatures will not be made publicly visible, the data, which will state the number of signatures in each district, will be introduced to legislators.
Patterson said he hopes to reach 5,000 signatures on the petition, but he would like to receive as many as possible.
“I want everyone in the state to sign,” he said. “This affects everybody.”
While the petition is anticipated to remain open until April 30, Tucker Barry, political director at Capital City Alliance, said the closure date for the petition may be extended further.
“You don’t know when your bill will get picked up,” Barry said. “It’s all just depending on the schedule of bills being heard. The governor is proposing so many education bills that it’ll be swamped in the committee.”
Barry said Louisiana enforces two anti-bullying laws — one general law about bullying in schools and one specific law about cyber bullying.
Some states also have similar laws on bullying, but Patterson said California and New Jersey have the most inclusive anti-bullying laws.
“There are a good number of states that have some kind of law, but they may not be all that specific,” he said.
Additionally, the revised bill will apply equally to students and school employees.
“A lot of people in our testimony [last year] mentioned that teachers may not do anything about bullying or may actively be participating in bullying themselves,” Patterson said. “We wanted to make sure this was included, and the Louisiana Association of Educators was also behind this.”
Louisiana’s current anti-bullying laws apply to all public schools but are exempted from six parishes.
Barry said the proposed bill will close the gap in parish exemptions that exist in the current law.
East Baton Rouge Parish is one of the parishes excluded from the laws. While the parish has its own polices on bullying, Barry said all the parishes should approach bullying on the same level.
“A student in East Baton Rouge should have the same rights as a student in Lafayette,” Barry said.
Patterson said “there’s no real reason that we know of” to explain why the exemptions were put into place.
Barry said last year’s anti-bullying bill was heard in the House Education Committee where a large number of supporters turned out to encourage legislators to pass the bill. But once the bill reached the House floor, Barry said the discussion around the bill lost focus on bullying and became a discussion on sexual orientation.
“It became a distraction from the mission of the bill,” Barry said.
This year, Barry said there is a new strategy to organize for the passage of the bill.
“We are working very hard to have organizations sign on to support the bill that reflect the true diversity and sweeping support that the bill has around the state,” Barry said. “We’re still approaching other groups. This is the first time anything like this has been done across all these different groups.”
 
 
 
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Contact Kate Mabry at [email protected]