A Florida school district is looking into an incident in which 13-year-old Melanie Conn was bound in plastic wrap by two of her peers while waiting for the school bus.Mother Holley Angerson-Conn tells WKMG that the two boys surrounded the middle school girl at the Ormond Beach bus stop, wrapping her 10-15 times to cover her from the waist to over the chin, nearly enveloping her nose and mouth.“This is not a joke,” Conn said. “This could have become very serious if they would have had a little bit more and nobody was able to get it off of her.”
Conn says the bus attendant was aware of an alleged threat from the boys a few days earlier, but did nothing stop it. Volusia County Schools spokesperson Nancy Wait told the station that the district “takes every reported incident of bullying seriously, fully investigates them and, if substantiated, takes disciplinary action.”
The boys have been suspended, and one of the mothers says she doesn’t understand why her son did what he did, himself being victim to years of bullying.
Allegations of insufficient busing oversight have surfaced nationwide. Indiana mother Lora Hoagland is upset that a school bus driver failed last month to intervene immediately when a student beat her son to the point that he required stitches.
But sometimes even the adults can’t fix everything — when they become the victim. A video depicting Greece, N.Y. school bus monitor Karen Klein being maliciously verbally abused by the students she was watching over went viral in June, sparking national outrage and leading to a campaign on website Indiegogo.com to buy the district staff member a dream vacation.
The campaign brought in about $700,000 in donations, some of which Klein is planning to put toward the Karen Klein Anti-Bullying Foundation.
“We’re hoping to get other people to put money in it, and this is going to be for education for people that have been bullied, for people that just — for people that need it for this situation,” she told WROC last month.
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