As of Jan. 1, California school principals and superintendents can suspend or expel students for cyberbullying acts committed outside of school.
Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia introduced Assembly Bill 256 on Feb. 1, 2013, and Governor Jerry Brown signed it into law on Oct. 10, 2013. The bill also updates the definition of cyberbullying to include actions such as impersonating, online or offline, another person with the intent to cause harm to a student and creating web sites aimed at harassing a certain student.
Before the approval of the bill, school officials could only suspend or expel students if the cyberbulling took place during school hours or was related to a school activity.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, Cyberbullying Research Center and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 52 percent of students in the United States were cyberbullied last year.
“I was bullied on Tumblr for the stories I’ve written, through constant messages and story reviews with anon hate that always had nasty words about how they supposed I was in real life and how terrible my writing was,” a female student said. “I couldn’t tell anyone, not even my parents, because I was afraid of ridicule or even worse, having my loved ones unnecessarily worry about me.”
Sophomore Curtis Trinh said that while he was playing a game called Lunia, several players harassed him until he left his account.
“They would go out of their way to track me down and ruin my gaming experience, and eventually I just quit the game,” Trinh said. “Being cyberbullied like that on a game impacted me in such a way that I started having trust issues with people and thought rather negatively towards them and their actions no matter how little it was.”
Following the suicides of two high school students last year, the Glendale Unified School District hired the company Geo Listening in an attempt to protect their students. Geo Listening monitors the students’ social media, looking through public posts and combing for terms that suggest anything harmful. They give daily reports to the school administrators about the students’ activities.