Would you give your toddler a balloon to play with? No? You’ve heard they can be deadly, right? Well, in at least one school district in the United States, your child has double the chance of dying by their own hand than from choking on a balloon. In this school year alone, eight students have committed suicide in a Kentucky school district. Eight students out of 95,000. That’s about 1 in about every 12,000 kids with the most recent being a ten-year-old. This student was so bullied that he believed taking his own life was the only escape. Even after repeated complaints by the boy’s parents, the bullying never ceased. Why do we allow this to continue to happen? Why do these bullies get to stay in school with other kids?

My eight- year-old son came home a couple of weeks ago with a write up from school. The note simply said that Bryan had thrown another student to the ground. Because of this, he lost points towards rewards for good behavior (no Skittle from the teacher for him this week). I asked Bryan why he did this, and he told me that so and so was hitting my friend, so I threw him down to make him stop. Ok. Defending those smaller than yourself. Perfectly fine in my book, but because of the school zero tolerance for any violence, I told Bryan that he can’t do that. He can’t hurt people. He needs to tell an adult what is happening and not get in trouble himself.

Flash forward two weeks later. Bryan and I are hanging out and I ask him how school was going. He tells me that today a kid in his music class knocked him down, jumped on his stomach, and ran out of the room while he was laying on the floor screaming and crying. He then told me about being kicked, hit, bit, and pushed down on the playground repeatedly. In shock, I asked him what he did to defend himself and make it stop. You know what he said? He said he did nothing. You know why? Because I had told him he couldn’t hurt people. My heart broke because he was right. He let himself be hurt so that he wouldn’t get in trouble. I did that. I made it so the bully could win and leave my child defenseless. The worst thing about this whole scenario? Though adults at the school witnessed these things, they never contacted me.

I went to the school and asked the principal why I was notified when Bryan threw a kid to the ground but not when he was injured and didn’t fight back. He admitted that I should have been. But the thing that shocked me the most from the principal? He sat there and told me that he doesn’t know what is wrong with kids today. That he has kids in kindergarten that choke others regularly. That violence is a regular thing among these elementary school kids and that there is nothing that he can do. He can’t expel students because every kid has a right to a public education. What about my kids right to feel safe there? What child can learn iN such an environment?