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Failure of the bill then would have meant it died in the Senate.
The group chose Green, who with a trembling and nervous voice that grew stronger as she spoke, told the lawmakers her daughter endured endless bullying in school that continued online after school.
“They called her names. They pushed her. They tripped her in school. They have thrown food and trash at her during school,” Green said.
Holding her daughter’s photo so the senators could look in her eyes, Green told them: “This could be any one of your children. She is just like anybody else. Beautiful. She’s intelligent. And now she’s gone.”
She didn’t tell the senators how her older daughter found Angelina missing on the morning of March 5. Or how she drove to look for her daughter, and discovered that someone had been found hanging from a tree. She didn’t describe how she kept telling herself her daughter would show up, all the time fearing that the body that police had found was Angelina.
Instead, she read to the senators the letter she found later.
“Dear eighth grade,” Angelina wrote. “To all the bullies that have called me names, (you) are the reason why I am feeling the way I am now. . . . I didn’t want to die. I just wanted to be saved from the pain.”
Green said she repeatedly talked to the school, but the seriousness of what was happening to her daughter was dismissed.
Wednesday, Sen. Pete Miller, the Avon Republican who sponsored HB 1423, told the committee that bullying is different now than it was when they were children.
This isn’t teasing, he said, and it isn’t something that schools can just brush off. Instead, Miller said, it is repeated humiliation that doesn’t end with the school day, but instead continues via the Internet, cellphones and social media.
A law passed in 2005, he said, is insufficient. It is too vague on just what is bullying, with inconsistent application of the law from district to district.
Under the bill approved Wednesday, bullying is defined as overt, repeated acts or gestures — made in any manner, whether verbally or electronically — that create for the targeted student a hostile school environment that places the student in reasonable fear of harm, has a substantially detrimental effect on his or her physical or mental health, and substantially interferes with the student’s academic performance or ability to participate in or benefit from the school’s services and activities.
