GUILFORD -- A recent Guilford High School graduate is getting a lot of attention the last couple of days following a Letter to the Editor she wrote recently, making strong assertions about the schools administration.
Kaileigh Roby alleges she was bullied as a student at Guilford High School and said the administration did nothing about it.
“Guilford High School is not a safe space for children when it comes to bullying,” she wrote in her letter.
“In my four years at GHS, I saw not one child helped, when it came to bullying.”
And, she said, that includes her, after she was pinned up against the wall by another girl, after weeks of threatening text messages.
“I think the first thing that the administrator, who was in charge of that case, said to me is ‘so what’s the problem here’ as if I had instigated it,” said the 2018 Guilford High School graduate.
And, she insists that bully, and others during her for years at Guilford High School, were never disciplined.
“Administrators seem to forget that this (bullying) is a federal crime,” she added.
But, the Guilford Superintendent of Schools, Dr. Paul Freeman, said, in a written statement, “Any reports of bullying are taken seriously, investigated completely and acted upon appropriately."
“As young men and women have come forward, to report the bullying, it’s not unusual for the bullying toward them to increase,” said Claudia Califano, M.D., a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist in Guilford.
She was part of a panel discussion following the release of a 2016 school climate survey, in which Guilford students in grades five through 12 were polled.
“That had some indications that there was a feeling of not being safe within the school,” said Califano.
Question 21, on the survey, was actually a statement, which read that students in their school respect each other‘s differences, such as gender, race, sexual orientation, etc. However, nearly one quarter of the student respondents disagreed with that statement.
“Every child deserves to feel safe with in their school,” Califano said. “Every child deserves to be listened to and responded to and attended to.”
Roby is heading into her freshman year of college.