Hello, Sydney,
Longtime lurker but first time commenter here, I live in Seattle and about four years ago my parents moved to a lovely but dilapidated historic house in South Bend. I found your blog while trying to find more information about the history of Pacific County, and now read it regularly.

I think (and this is just the opinion of someone who doesn’t know the personalities or social dynamics involved so I’m not judging anyone’s parenting here, just relating my experience) that though Seattle Schools pays a lot of lip service to recent anti-bullying campaigns, they do a very poor job of taking action when bullying happens in the schools.

My son was in fifth grade at one of the better regarded elementary schools in Seattle (Stevens) and he came home one day quite upset. It was difficult to wrest out of him what the problem was, but ultimately he revealed that he had repeatedly subjected to a quite vulgar joke, the details of which I won’t get into here, that started with the joker putting his hand on the victim’s shoulder. Worse still, the joker was a kid who he had been best friends with in day care. After some family discussion, my son’s father, the social ambassador of the family, went to the school and talked to the principal, and she promised to talk to the parents of the kid involved.

Two months later, I was called to school because my son was in the principal’s office and in trouble. He had bitten someone’s hand hard enough to draw blood. Whose hand had he bitten? Why the joker, of course! It turns out the principal had done absolutely nothing about the bullying, it had continued, and my son had not told anyone because he told us once and got no results, so he had given up on anything being done about it until one day he had simply had enough and fought (bit!) back.

Ultimately, my son was not in trouble for biting, and the principal did talk to the boy’s parents, who were embarrassingly apologetic when we saw them at the Holiday Pageant. The boy never did it again, although they avoided each other for the rest of fifth grade, but my son did have to put up with the bullying for a whole quarter, and it definitely flavored his opinion of school.

I guess what I am trying to get at here is if the teachers and principal just wait around for it to happen again, it WILL happen again. Bullies can be insidious and skate just inside the line of what is acceptable, and say “You are so SENsitive, I was just JOKing”. It would be lovely if teachers could just teach, but they are also in a leadership position. Ginger sounds like a very decent sort and she shouldn’t have to worry about this kind of thing every school day. If I had known that nothing was being done in my situation, I would have kept reminding the principal until she at least talked to the kid, if not the parents.

Thanks for writing so frequently, I enjoy your blog and it makes me feel a little more in touch with Pacific County even though Oysterville is so far away from South Bend.