Mountain Crest High School enforces its cyberbullying policy

On Spet. 21 Alina Brown, a student from Mountain Crest High School, was bothered by a message displayed on a poster for the school’s homecoming football game. The message read "You play ball like a girl." She took a picture and stated her concerns on Instagram.

Brown received more than 700 responses from friends and classmates. While some comments supported her views, others included negative vulgar language. When administration found out about the poster, it was taken down.

The poster was put up by a female student, referencing the movie "Sandlot."

"I haven't seen the comments or remarks, but I don't doubt that they were inappropriate and we don't condone that in any way," said Kirk McRae, the director of human resources for Cache County School District. "If it crosses the line to threatening or bullying that's when we feel like we need to
take appropriate steps to resolve."

The district's safe school policy states hazing, demeaning or bullying (including cyberbully activity) may be reason to remove a student from school or to be disciplined in some other way.

"We try to be very careful and only monitoring in our sphere of influence," McRae said. "We recognize that social media is a can of worms. Where we can and will take efforts to monitor, is when it either detracts from the educational environment or if there are illegal or threatening comments that affect a student or staff member. That's when we feel we have enough of a nexus to step in and take appropriate actions."

McRae said this policy isn't something new and the school had to enforce this policy on certain students

"We haven't changed polocies, we're just enforcing the polocies that currently in place," McRae said.
"I won't say who or what the response was. This was a case that was elevated to the point of them getting involved."

With this specific incident, McRae said the school handled the situation appropriately and has reached out to the Brown family.

"The school administration has worked very hard to understand their concerns and resolve those," McRae said. "We want every student to feel comfortable, safe and welcome there."

Mountain Crest High also has programs in place to help prevent bullying.

"One of the big things that we’re working on right now, every week during our home study time, we have a little video," said Craig Bracken, a counselor at Mountain Crest High School. "We call it the inside out program. With each week there is a different video with a different topic. This is week seven, so we’ve been doing this since the start of school. We would show them that clip and then we have them fill out a survey. They don’t need to put their name on it. What it's supposed to do is to help students to get the viewpoint of others, learn why it's important to respect and why it's important to not bully. "

In the counseling office, they take the surveys to collect data from them and tailor in interventions more specific for their school and students’ needs.

"So we have data from what the kids have told us and then we can use that data to help kids," Bracken said. "So this is what we’re doing as a school wide program to help with cyber-bullying, with bullying, with respect, with making Mountain Crest have a good atmosphere and good environment."