No.
The school is more concerned with whether or not the boys shirts are tucked in or the girls breasts are not showing when they should be a little more concerned with the kid getting tossed down the stairwell or beat up on the bus day after day.
There is a boy who rides the bus with Mark and he is repeatedly beaten up day after day and the bus driver does nothing. Hell, the bus driver doesn't seem to know where the hell she is going half the damn time.
The bus driver gets more upset over kids making animal noises than the fact that a kid gets off the bus everyday with some blood on his face.
A kid got pushed down the stairwell at school a few weeks ago and a teacher was present.
She did nothing.
She kept heading to her car.
The bell rang right? She wanted to leave and not have to stay and try to help that kid or punish the kid who did the pushing.
When you call the school about events of a violent nature, they are completely unaware of any problems.
They say that they will get on top of it first thing in the morning and give you a call back.
They never do.
They punish kids like Mark for drawing pictures or saying the word Hell and give him lonely lunch which is extremely alienating.
The kids in lonely lunch sit at a table at the front of the cafeteria right next to the teachers and everyone who enters can see them and the kids entering say lots of nasty things to the kids sitting there.
Do the teachers tell them to shut up?
What do you think?
They sit there paying absolutely no attention at all to the kids at lonely lunch table who are getting called names, spit on, shit thrown at them etc etc.
You call and talk to the principal and it goes on deaf ears.
They don't give a shit.

You call to report a bully.
What do you think they tell you?
They tell you that the bully is the victim.
That he has problems at home and that we need to be more understanding and try to help him.
Meanwhile, your kid is getting punched in the face, the arms, tripped and called names every single day.
They tell the kids who are bullied, the real victims here, to buck up and ignore it.
To be a better person and walk away from these situations.
These situations are happening right in the classroom and the teacher, who is obviously, from her lack of reaction to these acts of violence, deaf and blind.
The bullied kids don't even go to the teachers for help anymore because when they do, they get told that the bully is a victim of his circumstances and he needs our compassion. They tell this to your kid while he/she has a bloody nose.
They tell your kid to get some self esteem and deal with these issues of inadequacy that they have.
They have these self esteem issues because that little victim over there is punching him during science class you idiots.

I am not here defending Harris and Klebold.
They said that they were the bullied all of their lives and this was revenge. This was their way of getting back at the bullies and the school that did nothing to help them.
Maybe that's true.
We will never really know because they took their own lives.
What we do know is that schools have installed metal detectors and punish kids for broken pencil sharpeners with those tiny little razor blades in them because they may just want to slice someone up with it.
They are not defending the real victims of the bullying problem still.
They help the bullies by making the bullied feel even worse about themselves.
They send the bullied into see the school counselors about their self esteem issues and tell them to walk away and ignore it all and to feel some compassion for the kid kicking their ass every day.
His home life sucks don't ya know.
His parents ignore him and aren't home because they work late or whatever the case may be.
The school doesn't send him to counseling for his issues, they send the bullied.
The school doesn't call his parents about it, they call you and tell you that your kid has self esteem problems and that he brings this attention on himself.
What?
Hello?
He brings this attention on himself???
How? He goes to class and tries to learn and some asshole walks up and punches him in the arm or trips him in the hall and it's all happening right under the teachers watchful gaze and they all say that your kid, the bullied, brought it on himself by not walking away.

I kind of wish we could go back to the way it was when I went to school.
If you were getting bullied, you could go see the principal and his bad assness, he would haul that kid into his office, call the kids parents and suspend the jerk for a few days.
Now, the victim gets sent to counseling.
I had principals that would send a shiver of fear throughout your whole body and I never recall a single parent ever having a problem with Mr. Tsomidies kicking your kid in the ass or grabbing them and dragging them into his office so he could call your parents and suspend you.
If you saw Mr. T coming, you knew you were fucked.
You knew that mom and dad were gonna hear about what you did to that kid during gym class and you knew that your ass was going to get suspended and that mom was gonna chew your ear off and your dad was gonna kick your ass some more when he got home.
That was the biggest threat wasn't it?
You just wait until your father gets home.

Maybe that is the problem.
There is no fear of consequence for these bullies.
There is no suspension waiting for them, no parents to punish them within inches of their lives.
When I was a kid we feared our parents. We feared being spanked or punished or grounded or having to do some serious yard work all the while getting yelled at.
The kids today, have their parents in fear.
If you so much as raise a hand to your kid, they can tell a teacher and the school will call human services and you will get investigated and your kids know it.
You can't spank your kids because someone said it's child abuse.
The real child abuse is not giving kids consequences for their actions.
For every action, there is an equal yet opposite reaction unless of course you are a bully in the school system.
In school, if you push people around, you will get away with it and the kid you push around, gets sent to counseling.

The only thing that has changed since Columbine is the metal detectors.

Parents need to step up to the plate like when I was younger. They need to start being parents again and not allow themselves to succumb to the pressure that their kids place on them.
If my folks didn't want me watching a certain movie or a certain program on tv, that was it. It was law.
Kids today have free reign over whatever they do. They go out to R rated movies and their parents know about it and don't seem to care.
The kids have tvs in their rooms with full cable and internet in their rooms with locks on their doors.
The parents are in the living room not paying any attention at all.
Whatever happened to the family room with one tv and you either watched tv as a family or you went to your room and read a book?
The parents themselves are buying their kids violent video games because that is what the kid wants.
What about what's right and wrong?
Violent video games are not the cause of teenage violence, that would be like me admitting that Judas Priest is responsible for suicide, but it does have a lot to do with the way kids react to death and violence.
If it is a constant, (death and violence) they get used to it and it makes them basically numb to it and when they see dead people, it doesn't get any reaction from them.
I know kids who play hours and hours of violent games and then go outside and throw rocks at birds, poke dogs with sticks and push each other around and then when they get called on it, their parents defend them and say that darling little Johnny could never do that.
Really? That's why he was in my own house calling me a bitch to my kids because I don't let them play Grand Theft Auto.
You gave him the ok to be a jackass.

Parents need to get back to teaching their kids morals and ethics and right and wrong and not leaving it all up to the school.
We can see that it's not working.
If your kid does something wrong, punish them accordingly.
Sure they are gonna yell at you and scream and slam doors and tell you they hate you but it's your job to be the parent. It's their job to throw temper tantrums when they don't like what you say. They are kids after-all.

If your kid is a bully, you need to help them. If your kid is being bullied, you need to help them.

The schools hands are tied because no one wants to admit that their kid has a bully problem or that their bullied child could possibly go postal someday.
No one wants to admit that it is in their house.
My kids have a certain level of privacy.
But if I ask them to open a box or a drawer or the closet, it gets opened and I look at everything and I ask questions.
That was one of the major mistakes of the Harris'. They never went in his room.
If they had, they would have seen the bombs, the guns, the diaries clearly written out about his plans with his friend for that day.
They needed to be his parents and do the job they signed on for and look in his room and invade his privacy from time to time.

We as parents need to do our jobs and teach right from wrong and set limits and make our expectations known to our kids. It is our job.
If we do our jobs better and correctly, the schools won't have to make excuses for the bullies and tell the bullied to suck it up.
The schools also need to be able to follow through on their zero tolerance policies and take action against the violent students and not just continuously blow smoke up our asses and tell us they are taking care of it.
The adults of this country need to take back our rights to supervise our own children and our teachers need to be able to suspend the troublemakers.

The only thing that has changed since Columbine is the metal detectors.