Attorney: Delayed penalties soften Florida bullying law

Florida has one of the nation's strongest laws against bullying in schools, but the suspected rape of a 13-year-old at Walker Middle School raises questions about its implementation, said a lawyer who helped pass it.

The law was passed in 2008, but its penalties won't go into effect until next year, attorney David Tirella said.

"There are no ramifications yet," Tirella said. And he's worried that schools aren't being as aggressive as they could in dealing with bullying students and protecting their victims.

Tirella represented a family whose son, Jeffrey Johnston, killed himself in 2005 after relentless bullying at his Cape Coral school. The state law bears his name.

The Jeffrey Johnston Stand Up for All Students Act requires schools in Florida to establish concrete policies to discourage bullying in person and online or risk losing state funding.

It gave schools until the end of last year to implement new policies. If they don't, the state has the power to withhold funding, but not until next year.

If the penalties were already in effect, the Walker school incident might have been avoided, Tirella said. Under the threat of losing money, officials might have been more focused on getting students to report bullying incidents, and that could have forestalled the assault on the teen two weeks ago.

Tirella also said it should be easier to sue public schools for lax supervision that leads to bullying.

Now, schools are protected by state laws that limit damage awards in lawsuits. But if they were exempted from those protections, schools might work harder to protect students.

Tirella said he'll take cases against private schools but not a public school because of these sovereign immunity protections. Without them, "we would seriously consider suing," and public schools would face more than the threat of losing some state funding. They would suffer the embarrassment of a public trial.

Under that threat, "teachers would be forced to supervise kids and schools would be forced to supervise teachers, and there would be some accountability," Tirella said.

The Walker incident involved a 13-year-old boy who told Hillsborough deputies that two students pinned him on a locker room floor while two others raped him with a broomstick and hockey stick. It was the culmination of two months of bullying, deputies said.

Randall John Moye, 14; Raymond A. Price-Murray, 14; Lee Louis Myers, 14; and Diemante J. Roberts, 15, were arrested May 6 at the school on sexual battery and false imprisonment charges. They were remanded to their parents' custody the next day, according to the state Department of Juvenile Justice.