An anti-bullying support group leader expressed concern at Thursday’s school board meeting that incidents of bullying were vastly underreported to the Mississippi Department of Education.

Lauderdale County School District officials said reporting methods limited the complexity with which they could describe incidents — and that meant an incident that involved bullying might be reported as something else, such as a fight.

“The report that was submitted at the end of the year showed one bullying report for the whole district,” said Tracey Dooley, the founder of the Lauderdale County Anti-bullying & Cyberbullying Support Group. Dooley had written to the Mississippi Department of Education to request the information and received a reply explaining that “the Lauderdale County School District reported one (1) bullying incident during the 2016-2017 school year.”

Dooley objected to that report.

“I don’t care how you all are logging that in, that’s wrong,” she said. “I think that’s a slap in the face to all of the students who have been bullied.”

Dooley also said she wrote a letter inquiring about bullying incidents in the Meridian Public School District, and she received an email response saying that none had been reported for the 2016-2017 school year.

Dooley said after the meeting that she interviewed nine principals throughout the Lauderdale County School District. During the meeting, she told the board that she’d counted more than 100 bullying incidents from those discussions.

DeShannon Davis, the district’s director of federal programs/student data, described how she believed the reporting process can narrow the description of what happened. 

“It was probably coded as a fight or an argument … instead of the reason behind it (that) was bullying,” she said. “(The principals’) disciplinary reports are going to show that it was bullying. Parents will be called, and it will be addressed that way. But in the reporting system, in the way it’s reported (to the Department of Education), they have to click on certain things.”

Other officials spoke, too, about the way reports may focus on certain aspects of a disciplinary problem, labeling it something other than bullying.

“We take it extremely serious,” added Superintendent Randy Hodges. “…We have met, we have had speakers, we have done a lot the last three years to focus on bullying.”

Dooley continued to stress the need to find a way to report bullying in a more comprehensive way.

“When you report one to the state, that’s incorrect,” she said.