Temecula, Calif. – She has taken away the cellphone and banned TV, but when her daughter was suspended for bullying a classmate a week and a half ago, Ivory Spann felt a new punishment was in order: public humiliation.
After checking to see if it was legal, Spann forced her 12-year- old daughter, Miasha Williams, to spend four days last week in front of several Temecula schools carrying a big sign saying, “I Engaged in Bullying Behavior. I Got Suspended From School. … Don’t Be Like Me. Stop Bullying.”
“I felt I needed to do something that would make an impression,” Spann said.
It may have done the trick.
Miasha lugged around the handwritten sign from Great Oak High School to Temecula Valley High School to her own Erle Stanley Gardner Middle School and ended her “sentence” Thursday.
She displayed the placard in the mornings when kids arrived at school and in the afternoons when they left. At each stop, she was surrounded by somewhat baffled students. Sometimes she looked sheepish and embarrassed, other times as if she was enjoying the spectacle.
“This is my fault,” she said Thursday, holding her sign in front of Gardner Middle School, where the Temecula girl is a seventh-grader. “I agree what I did was wrong. Bullying is not a nice thing to have happen to you. The person who is bullying feels tough, but you have to understand what the other person must feel like.”
Miasha said the incident happened May 10 when she and five other girls confronted a fellow student who they said called them a racist name.
No violence occurred, she said, but the girl felt intimidated enough to complain. Miasha and another student were suspended for a week.
The 1999 massacre of 12 students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Colorado heightened awareness of the issue.
