School offered bully tracking

Friday, August 13, 2010

By FRED CONTRADA

fcontrada@repub.com

SOUTH HADLEY - A South Hadley High School alumnus is donating to his former school system a software program he designed to track bullying complaints.

Edward G. Wall, who graduated from the high school in 1988, said he formed Earshot Technologies and created the tracking software in response to the death of freshman Phoebe Prince and the subsequent turmoil over the school's handing of the situation.

Prince, 15, hanged herself in Jan. 14 following what investigators have said was several months of bullying and harassment by some classmates. Six former South Hadley High School students face criminal charges in connection with Prince.

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As Wall explained it, the software allows students, parents or anyone else to report bullying by accessing an on-line form. The schools can provide links to the system through the School Department website, the Internet social networking site, Facebook.com, or a number of other ways, Wall said.

Every teacher, guidance counselor and administrator who interacts with the student named on the form will immediately be texted and can add their own observations. The software will, thus, compile a comprehensive report that cites multiple sources.

"One of the big complaints (in the Prince situation) was the delay in time and who was notified and when," Wall said.

His application keeps track of those details so that school officials can say exactly when they learned of a certain situation and how they responded.

Critics of the school system contend that teachers and administrators failed to deal adequately with the situation in advance of Prince's suicide.

Following the deaths of Prince and Carl Walk-Hoover, an 11-year-old student at New Leadership Charter School in Springfield who hanged himself in 2009 after being bullied, the state Legislature passed a law mandating that every school system in Massachusetts come up with a plan for dealing with bullying.

South Hadley created an anti-bullying task force that met for several months. Among its areas of concern was creating a reporting system for bullying acts, preferably one that would allow people to remain anonymous. Along those lines, Wall came up with his Anti-Bullying Anonymous Incident Reporting and Management Application.

The cost of the software is $2,200, but Wall is donating it to South Hadley. He is also marketing the application to other school systems. Wall, who has been making his living as accountant and financial adviser, said he experienced bullying in school himself.

"I was able to handle it and move on," he said.

He hopes to create a fund with profits from his software to provide counseling for both victims and bullies whose families lack health insurance.