In which we deal with bullying

Monday afternoon Ezio came home from school and announced that one of the new kids in his class had been picking on him repeatedly. After determining that he had, indeed, been telling his teacher about it when it happened (he had), we decided that we had better get involved. First, we had to figure out what exactly was going on.

There is a new student, who will remain unnamed, in Ezio and Sapphire's class as of the end of Christmas break. (Actually there are two, but the second one doesn't seem to be a problem.) Evidently he was taking advantage of recess to hit, kick, bite, and shove Ezio, and to kick him repeatedly in the balls. Why was Ezio the one being picked on? I suspect because he is the smallest child in the class (generally CP (1st grade) kids are integrated straight off; he's in CLIN because they wanted Sapphire in CLIN and didn't want to separate kids from the same family) and also because he doesn't fight back. What had the teacher been doing about it? Chewing the kid out when it happened, which is probably not very effective when the person being chewed out speaks Arabic and you're doing the chewing out in French.

So, I wrote a letter to the teacher, outlining what had been happening to Ezio, and stating that I realized that Ezio had been telling him about it as it happened, but that things didn't seem to be improving, and asking that further measures be taken. We also told Ezio and Sapphire that it was very important that they stick together when they weren't in class, since it's a lot harder to pick on a kid who is surrounded by a bunch of other kids. (Sapphire is always playing with bunches of kids at recess. Ezio, not so much.)

Ezio gave the letter to his teacher on Tuesday, and when I went to pick them up after school, the teacher talked to me about what was going on. (Actually, I'm just assuming that. For all I know he was telling me that Ezio had won an all expenses paid trip to Nepal.) In any case, what Sapphire and Ezio told me was that whenever there was an incident, the kid would be losing a recess, but that their teacher had been too busy to write me a note in Ezio's cahier noir (the notebook that is used for all correspondence between home and school.

The last time we had trouble with bullying here (back in October, also with a new student who didn't speak any French and who was just slightly larger than Ezio), the bigger kids got involved in protecting Ezio and the teacher was able to take care of it relatively quickly. Ezio and Emmanuel are now friends, and play together at recess with some regularity. Here's hoping for a similar outcome this time.