Was it worth it? Would you send a kid through the same experience?

I don’t think it’s nothing new. I went to Trinity in the 80s and the bullying was pervasive. The meaner you were, the cooler you became. It was incredibly toxic. Someone in my class even published an essay about it. My classmates and I then had a FB discussion about the essay and it sounds like a lot of us have ptsd from it.

Yes, it was a SS school. I found it frustrated because there was no way for anyone to stay out of the mean girl stuff.
I never wanted to be popular at any age and neither does my kid, but even those kids are used as canon fodder.

This new law makes the school responsible for stuff that moves offline onto campus, but at least for now, I have not observed the school doing anything other than throwing up its hands. Parents are scared of getting crosswise with the school so they don’t protest and just accept their kid has to put up with it, especially if the kid is from an uber wealthy family or has famous parents.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I was taken aback by how the girls at my daughter’s school would go after kids who I viewed as non-combatants. You couldn’t just hang out on the edges and do your own thing. Everyone was drawn into the mean girls orbit all the time, and this is true of the mothers as well. It’s just relentless, and it didn’t help that the group chat started in second grade. Even if your kid wasn’t allowed on it, they were still talked about on it. The parents did not monitor it and did not care their kids were picking on other kids. There was no way just to stay out of it because they picked on you at school about not being allowed on it.

sounds exhausting. was this at a SS school? middle school grades?

Anonymous wrote:I wasn't aware of this Nate Bronstein case, but I myself transferred to Latin as a new 10th grader a few decades ago, and honestly this kid's experience feels so different than mine that it adds to my sense that private school culture has gotten much, much more toxic in the current generation of kids (or maybe specifically since COVID).

In my case, I made friends with a few nice low-on-the-social-hierarchy kids and everyone else ignored me and that was basically fine because I was only there for a couple of years anyway - nobody would have wanted to waste their time bullying me, they all had bigger things to worry about.

Yes, my experience at a similar school too. I just hung out with the low-on-on-the-social-hierarchy kids and was kind of ignored by other people except a few that I got along with from sports teams. No one really bothered or bullied me. I wonder if it's different nowadays with smart phones that make social media constant?

Anonymous wrote:I was taken aback by how the girls at my daughter’s school would go after kids who I viewed as non-combatants. You couldn’t just hang out on the edges and do your own thing. Everyone was drawn into the mean girls orbit all the time, and this is true of the mothers as well. It’s just relentless, and it didn’t help that the group chat started in second grade. Even if your kid wasn’t allowed on it, they were still talked about on it. The parents did not monitor it and did not care their kids were picking on other kids. There was no way just to stay out of it because they picked on you at school about not being allowed on it.

I'm the parent who's posted a few times about yanking my daughter out of Fieldston over bullying and this is exactly what happened - she was a new kid who would have been perfectly happy to do her own thing and ignore the popular kids, but the popular kids simply wouldn't let her get away with that.

Anonymous wrote:I was taken aback by how the girls at my daughter’s school would go after kids who I viewed as non-combatants. You couldn’t just hang out on the edges and do your own thing. Everyone was drawn into the mean girls orbit all the time, and this is true of the mothers as well. It’s just relentless, and it didn’t help that the group chat started in second grade. Even if your kid wasn’t allowed on it, they were still talked about on it. The parents did not monitor it and did not care their kids were picking on other kids. There was no way just to stay out of it because they picked on you at school about not being allowed on it.

sounds exhausting. was this at a SS school? middle school grades?

I was taken aback by how the girls at my daughter’s school would go after kids who I viewed as non-combatants. You couldn’t just hang out on the edges and do your own thing. Everyone was drawn into the mean girls orbit all the time, and this is true of the mothers as well. It’s just relentless, and it didn’t help that the group chat started in second grade. Even if your kid wasn’t allowed on it, they were still talked about on it. The parents did not monitor it and did not care their kids were picking on other kids. There was no way just to stay out of it because they picked on you at school about not being allowed on it.

I think it’s a combination of both social media and the insane rat race of college admissions. Out of the gate, the kids are so competitive with each other as are the parents, and the focus has shifted from a solid educational background, to if you’re charging me all this money you better get my kid into harvard. I have spoken to alums who are despondent on how different the culture of the school they love has changed over the past decade. I didn’t pick a school for my 5 year old based on its exmissions record, but I think a lot more people do than I realized.

I wasn't aware of this Nate Bronstein case, but I myself transferred to Latin as a new 10th grader a few decades ago, and honestly this kid's experience feels so different than mine that it adds to my sense that private school culture has gotten much, much more toxic in the current generation of kids (or maybe specifically since COVID).

In my case, I made friends with a few nice low-on-the-social-hierarchy kids and everyone else ignored me and that was basically fine because I was only there for a couple of years anyway - nobody would have wanted to waste their time bullying me, they all had bigger things to worry about.

My guess is that the law is a way of giving people a pretext to sue if a school isn’t following guidelines.

Chicago Latin is facing a number of lawsuits over the Nate Bronstein death (the school covered up his bullying and didn’t report it to parents because one of the bullies was the child of a board member).

Even the individual members of the board are being sued for failing to keep a proper record eye on the admin there, which is supposed to be the board’s number one priority. The school has been run into the ground financially by bad heads. It is just bad all around.

Unfortunately, I think as parents, the only thing you can do is be aware that a private school can operate this way (even a “TT” one) and that you should always be skeptical that they might have motives other than the good of your own kid when dealing with them. You just need to be wary and put your kid first.

you can just have a discipline code and punish the kids who break it no matter who their are. i could have all the money in the world, and i would still want that for my kid. kids who are catered to and allowed to break rules just end up becoming fail sons.

Oh, I totally disagree — if the kid needs to leave for their own sake, fine, but you also need to toss the bully. Otherwise you are just emboldening the bully and giving them veto power over who the classmates are. The parents all talk, the gossip gets around and an already very toxic situation gets more and more toxic.

The other kids know about why certain kids don’t get into trouble, and you are just teaching them that it doesn’t matter if the same thing happens to them. They become very cynical very quickly and lose trust with the adults at the school. They start testing boundaries way too young. It has a deeply corrosive effect to let the bully stay.

It’s also hard to trust them to play fair with college exmissions if they don’t punish kids for harassing other kids.

If a child is being bullied by several kids (or a big donor family) the best way to protect them is to counsel the person being bullied out.

it's not the morallly right thing to do but financial and reputational it is probably the right thing.

hopefully this thread can stay on track.

the law definitely means well. and bullying can be bad as discussed in the previous thread.

I wonder if there will be negative consequences to this law - depending on the actual wording of the law.

What I mean by this - if I am a school head and am presented with bullying - of course I try to stop it and prevent it. If it keep continuing and I feel like the child is trending to a mental health episode - do i refuse to extend their contract for the following year?

The financial burden can cripple a school. Will they just decide to punt on the problem if it can't be fixed?

This fall, Hochul signed into law an anti-bullying measure that applies to private schools and legally requires them to obey certain protocols to prevent bullying. It holds them responsible for not shutting it down and makes them liable if such bullying continues. The Reids who worked hard to get this bill passed lost their son to suicide and have directly linked his death to the cyber bullying he experienced at a private school. There have been a rash of suicides in Manhattan private schools over the past year, and I know the subject weighs heavily on a lot of parent’s minds as does how these schools handle difficult subjects such as bullying and the mental health of their students.

I admire the Reids for turning their pain into something productive. I am starting this thread so that anyone who would like to discuss the down sides and toxicity of private schools in Manhattan, or experiences, will have a space to do so.

My hope is that the people who don’t want to be on it, respect the people on its right to conduct their conversation about the places their children are without them the way they choose. I will do my best to avoid them trying to bait me into an argument about my own motives. If you don’t trust them, that’s fine —
who want to discuss things on an anonymous board to do so anonymously. If you’d like to conjecture and gossip about me or call me names, go ahead, but I’d prefer if you did so on another thread.