Read Online No Easy Answers by Brooks Brown Rob Merritt - Free Book Online

Another form of bullying against this student, a practicing Jew, involved racial slurs and ethnic intimidation, including threatening by the bullies to ‘build an oven and set him on fire.’ Each time a basket was made during P.E. basketball, the bullies would state, ‘that's another Jew in the oven.’ They also wrote a song to torment the victim.” The boy reported the bullying, and initially administrators confronted the bullies over their actions. However, the report states, the victim continued to be harassed for the next year and a half—and each time the new incidents were reported, “The counselor would bring the bully in to question him, the bully would deny the behavior, and they would let it go, telling the family, ‘we're doing everything we can,’” Huerter wrote. “The victim states that ‘they (the administration) did everything but call me a liar.”
One student told his parents he wouldn't go back to Columbine after an incident with “four or five football players shoving and pushing him, harassing him verbally and following him to his car.” The boy's father called school officials, who did not return the call for six weeks. When an administrator did finally call back, he was very short and rude, the father recalled. The family pulled the student from Columbine and enrolled him in Heritage High School nearby. The student told Huerter that he still refuses to enter Columbine property to this day.
“I was told by adults working in the district that they were afraid to speak up about school issues, including school culture and bullying behavior, because they feared losing their jobs,” Huerter wrote. “All said bullying behavior was going on, that they did tell APs (associate principals), and nothing was done.”
    According to Huerter, several of the individuals she interviewed pointed out that deans, assistant principals, and principals were “often, if not always, coaches, or had a coaching background. This feeds a further perception that athletes were given preferential treatment by those deans or APs.”
    Students who weren't the main targets of the bullies did not always realize the extent of the problem. One former student Huerter interviewed “felt the cliques and bullying were just part of being in school. She doesn't believe that now.”
    When this young woman's sister started at Columbine, she went from straight A's to failing. The family didn't know about it for months, until finally a physics teacher called. The girl reported being unhappy in Columbine's atmosphere, so her parents chose to enroll her in another school instead. There, “she is again flourishing,” and notes that kids at her new school are friendly regardless of what “cliques” they're in.
    The older sister now works with teens from several different schools. “As they talk about their school experiences it has become apparent that bullying is not present in all schools—at least not to the degree she witnessed at Columbine,” Huerter noted.
    As for students like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, Huerter wrote that everyone she interviewed described the pair as “loners” and “often the brunt of ridicule and bullying. Although no one had specifics about when and the degree of bullying they received, most often it was about shoving, pushing and name-calling.”
    Even those who associated with Eric and Dylan were punished. A female student told Huerter that she was talking to Dylan Klebold in the school hallway during her freshman year. “After their conversation was over, one of the notorious bullies slammed her against the lockers and called her a ‘fag lover,’” Huerter wrote. “Many students were in the area, but no adults. She did not report this to the administration. When I askedher why, she said that everyone told her ‘it wouldn't do any good because they wouldn't do anything about it.’”

    Some kids take refuge from bullies through their schoolwork. This wasn't a solution for me.
    I found