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No one denies that Dominique Reed is getting bullied. The question is, why is she getting punished for it? 

After “coming into her own” in elementary school, Reed has been living a nightmare in her first year at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School. In her special education classes, bigger and older students quietly taunt her, in the hallways they push her and punch her, in the playground they steal her hearing aid and throw it as far as they can. 

After months of daily abuse, school officials finally took action: They confined Reed to a classroom during recess for her own safety. 

Vice principal for sixth graders Doreen Sing said school policy prevented her from commenting either on the decision to keep Reed indoors or the family’s complaints. Sing and Principal Kit Pappenheimer refused to reply to follow-up telephone calls asking to explain the school’s policies on bullying. 

Reed says she knows why she has become the number one target for the number one bully in her special day class—a special education anachronism the district plans to phase out—that mixes students with behavior issues with others with developmental disabilities.  

“He was messing with another kid who’s cross-eyed,” she said as she stared at the floor, her voice barely audible. “I said ‘stop messing with him.’ I’m tough, but now they mess with me.” 

Reed draws strength from 11 years of struggle. She stands perfectly straight, her stomach extended slightly beyond her chest. Her face is dominated by plump cheeks; her hair set back in tight braids that fall over the $3,000 hearing aid she now removes in the playground so no one yanks it from her ear.  

Reed is diagnosed with a hearing disorder that magnifies and distorts loud noises. She has suffered from the illness since birth but was only diagnosed three years ago, her mother said. Reed also takes medication for Attention Deficit Disorder. She has always scored low on standardized tests and except for a few blissful years at Malcolm X Elementary School has always had to battle bullies. 

Three times Reed tried to show her tormentors just how tough she was. Acting against the advice of the school, she fought back. Each time she was suspended along with the attacker. 

“There’s nothing I can do,” she said. “If I tell, nothing happens, and every time I defend myself I get suspended.” 

That doesn’t mean Reed has passively accepted her fate. Tired of being confined during lunch, she stopped going to her assigned classroom and returned to the playground. 

A few days later, she described the following incident. “He had me under his leg in a headlock, then he hit me in the back of my neck. I wanted to grab his head and twist it off,” she said.  

She tried to and was suspended again. 

After the fight, Andrea Reed, Dominique’s mother, spoke again with Vice Principal Sing and learned that her daughter had been confined indoors during recess for two months. Reed was furious that no one at the school informed her of the decision and that when Dominique stopped showing up no one bothered to retrieve her. 

“No one is taking accountability for this,” Reed said. “My daughter is getting picked on, hit, tagged, and no one at the school thinks it’s their responsibility to stop it.” 

“I’m at the breaking point right now,” said Larry Reed, Dominique’s father. “They’re sweeping it under the rug. “If I have to walk in the school every day and protect my daughter, I’ll do it. Maybe it will click in their heads that they need to do something.” 

Andrea and Larry Reed are hardly the first parents to charge the district with failing to protect their child.  

Laura Menard, the PTA parent advocate, said Berkeley Unified is good at implementing preventative programs and anti-bullying curriculum, but when it comes to dealing with actual chronic cases of abuse, it has no standard operating procedures, no system to report incidents, no standard forms to document and track cases, no accountability for teachers and staff and no plan to protect targeted kids so they feel safe in the schools. 

“I’ve never reconciled in my mind how the district, knowing what a kid goes through, could be so unconscionable to not have any type of a response plan,” she said. 

Berkeley High PTA Treasurer Matt Wong recalled a labyrinth of bureaucracy he faced when his child was suspended from King for defending himself.  

“If you’re a parent and your child is in danger, you don’t know who to turn to,” he said. “If we weren’t active in the district and didn’t know the right people, we wouldn’t have known what to do.” 

Wong raises a legitimate concern, said School Board President John Selawsky, who has been the board liaison on issues of school violence and bullying. He wants to centralize and codify district policies. “How do you have conversations on this when you don’t have the same programs in place at the schools?” he asked. 

In April, the school board is scheduled to discuss a plan to offer stipends to teachers and other staff to provide additional supervision during lunchtime, Selawsky said. The proposal is estimated to cost approximately $10,000 and would help supplement the work of school security officers, several of whose jobs were cut during the district’s budget crisis. 

Gerald Herrick, the district’s director of student services, insists more reforms are on the way. This spring Berkeley High is scheduled to make available incident reporting pamphlets giving students and parents precise instructions on who to contact when they fear for their safety. The pamphlet, pioneered by a parent safety committee, could soon be made available to middle schools as well, Herrick said. 

“I don’t deny that we have to put better systems in place to help document problems and follow up,” he added. “Right now every school does its own thing. Sometimes that makes it harder, sometimes that helps schools find solutions that work.”  

One policy that is uniform in the district is that any student who fights, even if it’s in self defense is suspended for at least one day. 

Andrea Reed said so far the solution King officials have offered is to transfer her daughter to another school—a resolution she has refused to accept. 

“Why should my daughter have to transfer to a school across town. She’s not the problem. If she leaves, they’re just going to pick on someone else.” 

Director Herrick said transferring the bully is especially difficult when it’s a special education student because that requires school and parent approval.  

He added that he wasn’t surprised that Reed was kept in at recess. The practice, called “time-out,” is commonly used by teachers to handle such problems, he said. That is just one of several tools at the district’s disposal to handle bullying. The school can also suspend students, offer them counseling or, if both the aggressor and the victim agree, they can enter conflict management. 

But, in cases of bullying, conflict management doesn’t work, no matter the circumstances, said Vivian Linfor, education programs consultant for the California Department of Education. “Bullying isn’t an argument or a disagreement, it’s a power play,” she said. “Having them meet on equal terms makes the bully that much more determined since he knows he has the power.” 

Linfor said California schools have done a poor job addressing issues of bullying and school violence, partly because of the emphasis now placed on test scores and partially because the don’t understand the problem. “Bullying is a different animal,” she said. You need some kind of system in place for dealing with it,” she said. 

At Willard Middle School, Vice Principal Tom Orput is working with parents on a system that would demand accountability. He has placed forms throughout the school that offer students the chance to discreetly alert school officials when they feel threatened. When the complaint is lodged, the vice principal will fill out a report with a case number to track the incident. 

“It will be like a police report,” said Orput. “Every time there is an incident it will get added to the report and we can’t close it until there is a final disposition.” 

School officials at King haven’t documented her complaints, Andrea Reed said. She claimed to have spoken to Vice Principal Sing more than 10 times about the violence against her daughter, but the only testimonial to her complaints in Dominique’s permanent record on file are the three suspension notices. 

“Instead of getting help, she’s getting a record for defending herself,” Reed said. “It’s setting her back.” 

Convinced the school couldn’t help her, Reed filed a police report in December and met with Sergeant David White of the Berkeley Police Department’s Youth Services Division. White couldn’t talk about the case, but after a particularly rough day in class, Dominique Reed is certain he paid a visit to the parents of the main bully. 

“[The boy] told everyone that my parents told the police on him, she said. “They surrounded me and got in my face and said they were going to hurt me.” 

Her biggest disappointment that day? That the police had only given the boy a tongue lashing. 

“I want them to take him to jail so he quits messing with me,” she said. 

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