A viral Facebook post from a Lehigh Valley parent is putting bullying in the spotlight.<\/p>\n
Julie Kalinoski showed us the thousands of comments on her Facebook post<\/a>\u00a0about her daughter’s struggle with bullying.<\/p>\n “It has been very heartbreaking to read the stories that I have read,” said Kalinoski.<\/p>\n Heartbreaking, because the comments made it clear, bullying is common. Kalinoski’s daughter is a 9th grader at Parkland High School. Kalinoski said bullies put a nicotine vape in her daughter’s backpack and reported it to the Safe2Say<\/a>\u00a0system.<\/p>\n “She received an in-school suspension at school, and at home she was grounded for two weeks,” said Kalinoski.<\/p>\n Grounded, because Kalinoski initially thought her daughter actually was smoking. Her daughter was also facing criminal charges for having a nicotine product on school grounds, until they got the evidence.<\/p>\n “Both the blood and urine came back negative,” said Kalinoski. “We did have to go to the magistrate, where she was found innocent on both charges.”<\/p>\n But Kalinoski said the damage to her daughter’s mental health was done.<\/p>\n “I found a note that she was at her last straw to live,” said Kalinoski. “It became a matter of life and death. They were not keeping her safe.”<\/p>\n So she pulled her daughter out of school for now. In response, the Parkland School District sent us a statement, saying in part:<\/p>\n “Neither PHS nor Parkland School District can comment directly on the matter. Parkland School District takes bully allegations seriously.”<\/p>\n To learn more about what could be done, we reached out to Strong Minds, Bright Futures<\/a>, an organization involved with student mental health.<\/p>\n “Unfortunately, the situations you described are, at least generally, not uncommon,” said Communications Director David Haeyn-Menendez.<\/p>\n Heayn-Menendez said, throughout Pennsylvania, bullying and mental health issues are growing.<\/p>\n “All of the indicators, like when you ask students how is your mental health, have gotten worse,” said Haeyn-Menendez. “These are astronomical numbers that we haven’t seen in past generations, and they’re not going to go away.”<\/p>\n Strong Minds, Bright Futures promotes more funding for student mental health services as a solution.<\/p>\n “We have the capacity to do this, to make sure that almost every young person in Pennsylvania has access to universal mental health supports in-school and outside of school. We have not yet invested in that,” said Haeyn-Menendez.<\/p>\n But if government doesn’t act, he said there are still services available.<\/p>\n “The Pennsylvania Department of Education has a prevention consultation line<\/a>, where you can ask for advice about how to address chronic bullying,” said Haeyn-Menendez. “NAMI Lehigh Valley<\/a>\u00a0is an amazing resource for local people. They have peer-to-peer support, they have trainings for parents, for children.”<\/p>\n While Kalinoski tries to navigate those resources to help her daughter, she’s also asking the School District to move the bullies out of her daughter’s class.<\/p>\n “I would like the school to take action. I would like it to be more than just words on a paper,” said Kalinoski.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A viral Facebook post from a Lehigh Valley parent is putting bullying in the spotlight. Julie Kalinoski showed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":136836,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[214,119,121,120,232,805,233],"class_list":["post-136835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-_homepage_top_stories","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news","tag-allentown-area","tag-lehighvalley","tag-schools"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136835"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136835\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/136836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}