Whether it is happening in our schools, our workplaces, or online, bullying is a significant challenge in our society.
In 2024, the Commission on Professionalism issued a report on the impact of bullying in the Illinois legal profession. The report, which was based on a study of more than 6,000 Illinois lawyers, found bullying to be pervasive and to cause negative personal and professional impacts for lawyers, as well as the profession as a whole. The study is believed to be one of the first wide-scale research projects in the U.S. on the topic.
As we work to tackle bullying in legal workplaces, we are highlighting the important efforts of legal organizations and attorneys that are addressing bullying in other ways. Loyola University Chicago School of Law’s ChildLaw Center is one of them.
In July 2020, the ChildLaw Center launched an Anti-Bullying Project to provide free legal representation to children and families whose concerns about school bullying have gone unaddressed by school districts.
With the support of law students and supervising attorneys, the project advocates for thorough and effective bullying investigations and school-based responses, support plans for students who have experienced bullying, and proactive steps for school leadership in preventing and addressing bullying behavior going forward.
We spoke with Jacqueline Ross, clinical faculty member and staff attorney with Loyola’s Civitas ChildLaw Clinic, and asked her a series of questions about the Anti-Bullying Project. Her responses are shared below.
Why did Loyola Law launch the Anti-Bullying Project?
A Loyola alum, David Baker, reached out with an interest in starting this project within the ChildLaw Center.
David rightly identified an unmet legal need: free legal representation of families against school districts concerning unaddressed bullying.
While other nonprofit legal organizations in the Chicago area provide free representation of students in other school issues, such as discipline or special education, no other organizations have a specific focus on school bullying.
How are Loyola Law students involved?
Once a family has been referred by one of our recognized partners (including children’s hospitals, mental health facilities, and nonprofit legal aid groups), law students conduct an initial intake with the family.
The law student then presents the case to the supervising attorney, and together they decide the level of assistance the Education Advocacy Program will provide the family. Services range from referrals to quick advice, reviewing records to provide more tailored advice, or representation.
Law students continue to serve as the first line of contact with families. The students request records, get releases signed, draft correspondence to the family or opposing counsel, and help represent families in school-based meetings or court proceedings, such as civil no-contact orders.
The first phase of the project focused on casework and research to help those involved better understand the problem and gaps in current legal protections. What were some of the key takeaways from this phase?
The first phase of this work illustrated clearly that, while codifying legal and policy protections is a critical step in addressing the harms of bullying, these protections are not self-executing.
Without legal representation or other forms of support, many families cannot utilize these processes to protect students experiencing bullying or to address the factors underlying the behaviors.
It also illustrated the need for school staff — including teachers, administrators, and all school personnel — to receive high-quality training, so that they can better identify bullying when it occurs, understand the harms involved, and work to immediately respond in a way that supports the students involved and improves the overall school climate.
School districts often fail to alert families to the formal, legal protections available to them for alleging school-based bullying. The response is often a verbal, “We’ll look into it,” with little to no follow-through, rather than a formal bullying investigation.
When schools do look into bullying, they often do incomplete investigations, arguing it’s one student’s word against another. The school officials often throw their hands up and say they can’t know for sure if there is bullying. They often do not articulate their view on why or how it failed to meet the school district’s definition of bullying.
The Bullying Prevention Law in Illinois does not require a formal written report summarizing the school district’s investigation or findings. When pressed to produce one, school officials may cite student confidentiality as a reason they can’t share their findings with parents when the school could easily redact students’ names from the summaries of their investigations.
Families also don’t know of their right to a meeting to review the scope of the investigation or its findings. Often, when they insist upon one, it becomes clear what a shallow investigation was conducted.
Finally, families are often unaware that if bullying goes unaddressed to the point of causing their child significant anxiety, depression, or school refusal, that student could potentially qualify for special education services.
The project has provided direct representation for families as part of Loyola’s Stand Up For Each Other! program. What has the impact been?
We will often step in to inform the school district’s counsel of bullying allegations and request a comprehensive investigation. We then advocate for a detailed safety plan to make the student feel secure in school. We find that it’s often those unstructured periods, such as gym, lunch, recess, and extra-curriculars, that are often overlooked when creating safety plans.
Unfortunately, for us to get involved, often the bullying has been so pervasive that our client qualifies for special education as a student with an emotional disability. While it is upsetting that the bullying went unaddressed for so long, an Individualized Education Program (IEP) becomes necessary. This opens a new toolbox of protections and services to enrich the child’s school experience.
We often will use the IEP to get a child outplaced in a therapeutic school for children with depression, anxiety, school refusal, etc. Our clients often have great success in a smaller, more nurturing setting, and they get a fresh start by being separated from the bullies and the adults who failed to protect them.
How is the project collaborating with educational and policy leaders around bullying intervention and prevention?
This work has involved significant interaction with educators, school administrators, attorneys, and advocates for youth. One of the consistent themes to emerge is that, although bullying occurs between students, adults are responsible for creating a positive school climate by preventing bullying and responding appropriately to prevent harm.
With this understanding, Loyola’s Legislation and Policy Clinic has partnered with the Education Law and Policy Institute to identify potential gaps in Illinois’ bullying prevention and intervention laws.
The policy analyses indicate that, compared to other states’ laws, the Illinois school code has some strong components that encourage and support adults in preventing and addressing bullying.
But there are also notable gaps in Illinois law. For example, despite recent changes in the code, there are no specific requirements that educators or administrators receive training on bullying.
The law also lays out requirements for schools to investigate bullying allegations, and encourages — but does not require — schools to provide supports to students who experience, engage in, or witness bullying.
And lastly, it’s important to note that Illinois law creates a Bullying and Cyberbullying Prevention Fund, but it lacks dedicated revenue streams for the fund. As a result, schools are left without reliable or consistent state-level financial support to implement bullying prevention and support programs.
These and other issues are potential policy priorities in the days ahead.
One of your initiatives is to develop a network of public and private attorneys to collaborate on case referrals, bullying case strategies, and opportunities for partnership and collaboration. How can attorneys who are interested get involved?
We’ve found that attorneys may be intimidated to take lead on this case because there’s a fair amount of specialized knowledge required.
What would be most helpful to us is not a partner at the school meeting level but at the litigation level; attorneys who would be willing to file actions in state or federal court when our school-based advocacy has failed. Those interested can contact Jackie Ross at jross10@luc.edu.
In the coming year, we’re working to grow our number of referral partners to expand our reach.
Why is this work important for children who are bullied, their families, and the law students who represent them?
This work can be life-changing for students and their families. Many of our clients come to us after months or years of feeling unheard, effectively yelling into the abyss.
Simply having someone stand beside them, believe them, and work collaboratively toward solutions can be profoundly transformative. We are intentional about coaching our clients and elevating their voices, so they are active participants in their own advocacy.
After being ignored for so long, that empowerment alone can be restorative.
When we are able to achieve concrete outcomes — whether placing a student in a safer school environment or securing an aide the child trusts enough to return to school consistently — the impact is immediate and deeply meaningful.
We view unaddressed bullying as an upstream catalyst for many negative life consequences. Through this preventative, client-centered approach to lawyering, we can often help stabilize a child’s educational trajectory and support families in regaining a sense of safety, dignity, and hope.
Are there any especially impactful stories from the project that you would like to share?
A couple of stories:
Luis was a fourth-grade boy on the autism spectrum who is mostly nonverbal, which made it difficult for him to communicate the bullying he was experiencing at school.
Instead, his distress manifested behaviorally. He began throwing his body to the ground when his parents tried to take him to school and, on some mornings, refused to get into the car at all. Eventually, Luis stopped attending school for months.
We were able to secure a placement for Luis at a new school with staff who understood his history of trauma and school refusal. Shortly after he started, his father wrote to us: “I just wanted to update you about my son’s new school. By the third day, he sat at his desk all on his own. By the second week, he walked into the school by himself. It’s something incredible to see your son start to return to his life. He is happy to go to school now.”
There is also the story of Noah. After being assaulted by a peer who broke his arm, the same student attacked Noah again months later, causing a concussion.
Noah developed severe school refusal, yet the school maintained that its hands were tied and that there was nothing it could do unless Noah’s mother physically forced him to attend. With no other options, Noah’s mother took out loans from family members to place him in a partial hospitalization program. She then retained our office.
We secured reimbursement from the school district for Noah’s treatment, as the school’s negligence in addressing the bullying precipitated the need for intensive intervention. We also obtained placement for Noah at a therapeutic school where he could begin to heal.
His mother later wrote to us: “Seeing Noah with a genuine smile since the assaults was rare. His laughs were forced and exaggerated. Not only has attending his new school brought that back, but it has also reignited his excitement to learn. While he has a long journey of recovery ahead of him, your advocacy has made it possible for him to begin healing.”
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