Scarsdale Middle School Takes Proactive Approach Toward Bullying

On the heels of a New York Times and TIME article dealing with the concept of bullying, as well as countless suicides as a result of bullying, Scarsdale Middle School’s Principal Michael McDermott held a presentation about his school’s implementation of a proactive approach to bully prevention.

One word: empathy.

By using implicit techniques such as having students work with elderly persons on a project or learning sign language at the New York School for the Deaf to communicate with hearing-impaired students, McDermott feels that empathic tendencies can subconsciously be infused into his students.

Explaining his perspective on establishing the zeitgeist of empathy at his school McDermott said, "This is not a canned program that you purchase from somebody. This began as an incite growing out of our work with bullying that there is a larger umbrella concept called empathy, under which any number of issues can be addressed – whether it is ageism, sexual harassment or racial sensitivity. All of those really are manifestations of empathic or un-empathic responses."

Empathy is even woven into the school’s educational fabric. The aforementioned students learn skills like sign language and working within groups, while others had more creative approaches to dealing with empathy such as making videos incorporating the theme of understanding others.

SMS's whole staff is encouraged to also provide a space for learning empathy in everyday settings, not just educational ones. "It is the series of connected adults in this building that creates the culture of caring," McDermott said. 

In the presentation's Q&A portion, a teacher mentioned that the school recently had an incident of bullying. The moment was witnessed by two students, whom she said approached her. Fortunately, an escalation of the event was prevented.

The school’s main approach may be proactive, but when events like this occur, McDermott does not like to be heavily reactive, or in turn attack the bully, rendering the proactive empathic approaches hypocritical. "It's not just a punitive or disciplinary situation," McDermott said. "It is an opportunity to learn."

Referencing articles written for the New York Times, Time Magazine and several books, McDermott said that there is scientific support for empathy being an innate human trait. According to recent studies done on primates, observations and neurological findings have provided scientific support for this idea.

Though empathy is shown to be innate, we are all subject to our environment. If our environment does not support these tendencies, we begin to lose our empathic nature.

McDermott, in an effort to involve the parents in supporting their child’s empathic tendencies, illustrated this point by showing a clip of writer and speaker David Levine talking about his mother making comments in jest about him not being a good kid. Although parents do this all the time and don’t realize the impact, McDermott said that this is an example of parents unwittingly not being supportive of empathic tendencies toward their own children, which in turn could lead to diminishing their children’s empathy for others.

Speaking on what he has learned watching empathy nurtured at SMS, Principal McDermott said, "They’re sponges at this age. If you expose them to empathy, they will sop it up and will take it, run with it, create with it and do amazing things as a result."