Today in the Legislature

As I stated yesterday, LB 205 was introduced by Sen. Howard to require all schools to have a bullying policy and to update the definitions in the bill. Again nearly 90% of the school districts in the state already have policies in their student handbook regulating student conduct that interferes with school purposes which includes bullying. In visiting with the Nebraska Association of School Boards, their staff have personally reviewed over one-third of policies in the state of Nebraska. The real issue is enforcement.

While LB 205 raises the issue of bullying to the state as a whole, if the current law isn’t being enforced or if the schools don't have the tools to enforce the law we should look into possible solutions and not just naming the problem in statute. In fact, this bill does not give any new tools to schools to enforce bullying policies. It obviously would be a value to the districts who don't have a policy in place either specifically on bullying or in their student conduct.

An amendment was offered to strike the provisions that the school is required to police activity at a school bus stop. That amendment passed. Another amendment that was offered would have removed the provision that school review the policy every year. That amendment should have been adopted and we should empower the school districts to review them on their own within their duties as a school board and not just rubber stamp the previous policy every year.

The bill did advance and will likely not change the way that most if not all schools are already handling this issue.

The other bills we debated were technical in changing filing requirement or other procedures for corporations with the Secretary of State.

View the Legislature Live

When the Legislature is in session, you can watch it online at: http://www.netnebraska.org/television/stream/legislature.html or on your local cable network on NET2..

One Line Descriptions of Bills

To search the list of bills introduced for any day this session, you can visit the Nebraska Legislature's website by clicking here.

You will have to scroll down to 2008 to see the one line description of bills introduced this session.