For 67 years Don Hillbrant has carried the torment of having been a victim of severe bullying when a youth at Iola Junior High.
“I don’t really like to talk about it,” Hillbrant, 82, said Monday morning. “But I figure I’m here on this Earth only a short time more and perhaps if it can help raise awareness, then it will continue my battle to help the ‘downed.’”
When he was in ninth grade, Hillbrant became the target of a gang of five classmates who regularly harassed him, including physically humiliating acts.
“I was a farm kid, and poor,” Hillbrant said. “Back then there was a horrible stigma of living in the country.”
He used an analogy of what he’d seen many times on the farm, of baby chicks pecking to death a weaker member of the flock.
He shared the stories of abuse with his father, who advised him to tell the school principal.
“I couldn’t do that. I figured then 10 boys, not just five, would come after me if I told.”
For the rest of the year Hillbrant endured the humiliations and went by the motto, “Pride before destruction.”
“I didn’t want anyone to know something bad was happening to me. I saw it as a fault in me — not them.”
IT’S THAT MENTALITY that today’s school administrators are trying to fight, said Stacey Crusinbery, counselor at Iola Middle School.
“Students are scared they’ll make the problem worse if they report bullying,” Crusinbery said. “To a lesser extent, they’re also scared of not being believed.”
“I tell students that at first, the situation may get worse. But if it does intensify that gives us even more recourse to address the issue.”
Other classmates and friends are a victim’s best offense to bullying, Crusinbery said.
“Students stand up for each other. They’ll intervene and report cases of bullying. That seems to be the most effective way of controlling it,” she said.
A zero-tolerance policy of expelling a student for bullying doesn’t work, she said.
