13 Community Bullying Prevention Ideas for Schools
Community bullying prevention works when the school stops carrying the effort alone. Local businesses, police, service clubs, faith groups, and parents each take a visible role, so students hear the same message everywhere they go. The 13 ideas below are ones we have actually run in our own district.
A school can run a flawless bully prevention curriculum and still lose, because students spend most of their week somewhere else. That was the lesson of a 2017 school board meeting in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where an award-winning middle school teacher resigned in front of the board over how students were treating each other and the staff. You can watch her remarks and read the coverage here.
What struck me was not the students. At first I assumed a handful of kids needed accountability. Listening longer, the problem ran deeper than a discipline log: school culture, administration, the board, and finally the community itself. Watch what happens when she finishes. The board moves on with business.
So what can a teacher, principal, or superintendent do about culture that big? Every idea here takes work, and doing nothing guarantees the climate stays where it is. I keep coming back to a line usually credited to Albert Einstein, though nobody has pinned it to anything he wrote:
"The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything."
One definition worth fixing before you start. Bullying is unwanted aggressive behavior involving a real or perceived power imbalance that is repeated, or has the potential to be repeated. It is not any single unkind act. That distinction decides what your data means later, and it decides which incidents belong in a referral versus a classroom correction. Here are 13 ideas to start the conversation with your school and community, and to keep it going after the launch buzz fades.
Who Belongs in a Community Bullying Prevention Effort
Most schools start and stop with parents. Parents matter most, but they are one seat at a wider table, and the partners who tend to say yes are the ones nobody thinks to ask. StopBullying.gov's community guidance makes the same point: the message lands when children hear it from every adult in their life, not just the two at home and the one at the front of the room.
| Partner | What they can realistically contribute |
|---|---|
| Local businesses | Safe-zone window stickers, printing costs, prize funding, event sponsorship |
| Police and school resource officers | Support for reporting procedures and presence at community meetings. Their role in investigations and threat assessment varies by state law, district policy, and local agreement |
| Mental health providers | Staff training, referral pathways, support for targeted and targeting students |
| Faith-based organizations | Parent education space, youth groups already meeting weekly |
| Youth sports and recreation programs | Coach training, the same behavior expectations outside school hours |
| Service clubs (Lions, Elks, Rotary) | Volunteer hours, meeting slots for presentations, small grants |
| Parent organizations | Activity funding, parent-to-parent communication the school cannot replicate |
| City government and family services | Policy alignment, multi-agency coordination, data the school does not see |
PU #53 - School-Community Kickoff
A kickoff event gets a whole community looking at the same goal on the same day. Build the agenda around celebrating students, naming goals people can repeat, and showing the steps toward them.
In my community, the school implemented a new bully prevention program. We were putting new policies in place and running ahead of the state's own progress on the issue. Montana did not adopt a bullying law until 2015, one of the last states to do it. As staff, we took the new curriculum, philosophy, and mantra seriously.
Our community has a large football field the high schools share, and that stadium is where we held the kickoff. News and TV reporters came, along with other community members. All 10,000-plus students were bussed in. Administration addressed the crowd, and we heard what became, for many of our schools, the stepping stone to changing school culture. Every school was asked to bring a chant or cheer to share. The school spirit was obvious that day, and students still bring it up. The elementary kids who were there are in high school now.
PU #54 - School-Community Partnership Campaign
Partnership campaigns change the community, not just the school. They can be as intricate or as simple as the participants design, and in a real one, what the community tells you shapes the school's mission and vision for bully prevention.
When the school district in Great Falls, Montana started the Olweus program, local businesses got information on bully prevention and were asked to serve as a safe zone for any kid being bullied. Those businesses put stickers in their store windows reading, "Bully-free is good for me." We taught students they could walk into one of those businesses and report bullying.
That was our district's program at the time, and it is not something to copy as it stands. Directing students into private businesses to report anything requires an established, vetted arrangement first: staff screening and training, written reporting procedures, supervision, and sign-off under your district and community protocols. Without that groundwork in place, treat the sticker campaign as awareness only.
A partnership can also look like a simple stipend from a business or community member. In our district, the week before Halloween is Bully Prevention Week, which sits inside National Bullying Prevention Month in October and gives you a national hook to point at. Our school funds that week through the PTA. For the past couple of years we have run a poster contest, paid grade-level winners out of PTA money, then laminated the posters and hung them throughout the building, with the overall winner framed. It takes little to organize and keeps bully prevention in front of students, parents, and community members.
PU #55 - Student Service Projects
Students learn empathy by doing something for someone else. Service projects look different in every school, but the shape holds: students pick a cause, set a goal, then advertise to build school-wide and community support. They send fliers home, make posters, take the morning announcements, use social media, and sometimes get local news coverage. The cause can sit inside the school, the community, the state, or another country.
Our students have raised thousands of dollars for classmates facing health problems and for families hit by natural disasters, and they have run clothing, food, and book drives. We use an application process, and the principal picks one project a month to monitor, sometimes with the counselor. The application requires a parent at home to be part of it, and timelines, to-do lists, and check-ins are required of everyone involved.
Quick steps to start student service projects in your school:
- Pick a cause.
- Set a goal.
- Advertise how others can support you.
- Gather momentum and communicate progress toward the goal.
- Share your work with the cause, communicate the outcome, and celebrate.
One thing those steps leave out. Anywhere money is involved, whether that is a student drive, a PTA prize payment, a business stipend, or a donation, follow your district's policies on approval, accounting, and handling funds, plus any state or local requirements that apply. Students should never collect or transfer money on their own off the back of a list like this one.
PU #56 - School-Community Projects
Working alongside the community shows students we care about more than test scores, and it teaches them to give back. Beautification and cleanup projects are the most commonly chosen version. A whole school, a grade level, a single class, or one student can take one on.
At our school, we routinely clean the city park next door. This past year we put gloves on and worked next to members of our local Lions Club. One grade level went out to local organizations to weed, plant, and clean up flowerbeds. Those same organizations regularly send volunteers to our school events, so this is one way to return the favor.
Projects like these open the conversation about changing culture through tolerance, empathy, and kindness. Once the conversation is open, school and community members can work out the next steps together.
Work through your building and district first, though. Taking students off campus to work alongside an outside organization usually needs school approval, adult supervision, transportation arrangements, parent permission, and safety procedures, and the partner organization may have volunteer requirements of its own. This is not something an individual teacher or class can set in motion alone.
PU #57 - Community Discussions
Community discussions move real information to the public and give school officials input they can turn into goals. Write the questions in advance around your actual areas of need, then send them to community members before the meeting so parents arrive with responses and solutions ready. In a contentious community, a set agenda and time limits keep everyone on task and signal that this is a solution-focused meeting.
Leave room for open questions if time allows, since that is where topics you did not anticipate surface. Depending on format, an open floor can also pull the meeting away from your agenda. An efficient discussion has an agenda, holds to time limits, and gives everyone a chance to speak. If the pushback in the room runs wider than bullying, these strategies for handling community opposition to public schools apply to this kind of meeting as well.
PU #58 - Multi-Organizational Meetings
A meeting that puts several organizations in one room is one of the most powerful tools available in a community setting. School officials, city commerce, city council, small business owners, police, the appropriate state or local child or family services agency, and other influential groups can take a shared position against bullying and other citywide youth concerns.
Like community discussions, these meetings need an agenda, a goal, and basic rules for how material gets presented and discussed. Each agency can report how it handles social situations like bullying when it runs into them, then brainstorm how it might support the school's work.
This is the route I would take in the Green Bay case. Get multiple agencies in the room, have everyone own a piece of the behavior, and decide together how to go to a solution. Spending the meeting assigning blame to one teacher, the administration, or the school board does not solve anything.
PU #59 - School-Community Presentations
Partnerships hold when the channels stay open. These sessions can run at the school or at a shared community location, and a presentation with a question-and-answer block supports the goal of going to solution.
A useful presentation covers more than bully prevention mechanics. Show the community and your own staff what the school is doing to build a positive learning culture, because that is where the real answer lives. It is a chance to make clear the solution involves more than stricter policies and harsher consequences.
Presentations are mostly one-way communication with some questions at the end. Their job is to move information. You can take the same presentation around town to different organization meetings, including the Elk's Club, the Lion's Club, and other service clubs.
PU #60 - School-Community Bully Prevention Teams
Schools already run teams for every other kind of decision. A team of parents, community members, school staff, and students can drive change on bullying, because gathering perspectives that differ helps everyone empathize and problem solve at more than one level.
My school has not convened its full school-community team in a couple of years, but it made the difference when we launched our kickoff campaign and rolled the program out school-wide that first year. A smaller team came out of it, all school-based now: the principal, the counselor, and the school psychologist.
A working agenda for this team could include:
- Revisiting the mission and vision of the team itself
- Bully data and hot spots
- Problem solving and long-term goal setting
- Short-term goals to check progress and hold everyone accountable
- Celebrations at the end, probably the most productive part of the meeting and a positive place to stop
PU #61 - Community/Business Sponsorship Programs
Sponsorships show a commitment to schools and an understanding that everyone has a role in this. A sponsorship differs from a partnership: the business or community member wants to support the cause rather than help run it. Often that is a time problem, not a commitment problem. They believe in the mission and vision of your bully prevention program and would rather contribute financially.
Some ideas for what a sponsor can cover:
- Financial support for a kickoff event
- Copying, printing, and publishing of parent, community, and school handouts
- Advertisements or public service announcements on radio, TV, or news media
- Professional development for staff on bully prevention and culture building
- Presentations, community discussions, and other events they are not directly involved in
PU #62 - Community Survey and Data Shares
Once you are running bully prevention components, data collection is what lets you communicate success. Use it to set goals inside the school, and pull it from parents, community members, and students through surveys that feed your short-term and long-term goals.
Celebrating small wins can build a wave of support. When your team sees data move in the right direction, get that information out. Staff need to know their work makes a difference, and so do community members.
Be careful how you share it. Data gets judged, and it carries consequences you did not intend. Some districts rank their schools by the number of bullying incidents reported and acted on, which can drive families out of a building or make the underlying problem worse. Choose carefully what you release, explain it clearly enough to be hard to misread, stay honest with your stakeholders, and use it to celebrate wherever you can. What you put time into shows where your priorities are.
Privacy is the harder constraint. Anything you release publicly has to stay clear of personally identifiable student information protected under FERPA and any other privacy requirements that apply to you. In a small school, a single incident count broken down by grade or classroom can identify a student without naming one. Share aggregated, de-identified figures, and check anything borderline with whoever handles student records in your district.
PU #63 - Celebrate Success with Community-Wide Recognition
Celebrating even small wins tells the story of the school, marks the staff's progress toward the goals you set, and gives every stakeholder a direction to work toward.
Communicating that success is tricky. As a principal, I do not recommend getting on the PA to announce, "We only have 3 bullying incidents today. Let's go for two tomorrow." Spend the airtime on the behaviors you want to see instead.
What you choose to celebrate sets a standard you then have to match. My school has had fewer than 10 true bullying referrals in each of the past two years, using the federal definition: unwanted aggressive behavior with a real or perceived power imbalance, repeated or with the potential to be repeated. Plenty of other incidents get written up as tune-ups below the referral level, because our tiered discipline system keeps authority with every staff member. When a pattern forms, or an incident is severe enough, I get involved. We celebrate that number, and we keep studying the precursors: teasing, name-calling, and taunting.
We spend more time on positive behavior, with an emphasis on three traits: kindness, empathy, and tolerance. We build ways for students and staff to speak up when they see those three in the building. The theme changes each year, but students recognizing other students is contagious, and it gets stronger when you make it visible.
PU #64 - Social Media Celebrations and Pushing Out Information
Facebook and Twitter can carry progress toward your goals or simply push information out, and either one moves the culture of a school and its community. As with data shares and recognition, put the weight behind the behavior you want to see rather than the behavior you are counting.
Pictures, video, comments, quotes, data, and memes all work here, and knowing your audience shapes what you post. None of it is automatically appropriate, though. Anything involving students, including photos, video, live streams, and quoted work, goes out only under your district's social media policy, applicable privacy law, and whatever parent or student consent your district requires. Confirm which students have permission on file before you post, not after.
Schools have become a daily news source for student activities, engagement, progress, and athletics, and some run live video so parents can watch events as they happen. When new families arrive, point them at your Facebook page. They should be able to see evidence of your school's culture without asking for it.
Ideas for pushing out bully prevention information:
- Newsletters or bully prevention materials and guides
- Blogs, articles, and links
- Live bully prevention assemblies and skits
- Evidence of the positive characteristics your school is encouraging
- A bully-free live show on Facebook
PU #65 - School-Community Bully Prevention Guide Sheets
Guide sheets give parents and community members something to use at home that matches what students hear at school. Plenty of companies now sell materials you can print for parents. The advantage of building your own is that you can tailor it to your students, your parents, and your community. It also matters because bullying laws, definitions, reporting requirements, and investigation procedures differ from state to state, so a sheet built on national boilerplate can tell your parents the wrong thing about what the school owes them.
What to look for when building or buying guide sheets:
- Definitions
- Types of bullying
- Signs to look for at home
- Strategies for students who have been bullied and students who bully
- Students with disabilities
- Statistics
- Facts and common questions
- Information on legal rights, drawn from your current state and district requirements rather than generic national language
- Bully prevention resources
- Tips for parents working with schools
More Bullying Prevention Guide Related Readings
This post is part of the Bully Prevention Guide. The rest of the series:
- 3 Types of Bullying in School + 1 Immense Social Challenge
- 5 Reasons Why Schools Have a Difficult Time Stopping Bully Behaviors
- 5 Reasons Why We Need to Define Bully Behavior and Stop Generalizing Events as "Bullying"
- 6+ Steps to Addressing Bullying When It Occurs
- 9 Strategies We Can Teach Students to Problem Solve
- 7 Ways How to Raise a Defender of Bully Prevention
- Provocative Victims and 7+ Practices for Victory
- One School Wide Philosophy: High-Trusting Relationships
- 13 Ideas to Combat Bullying at the Community Level (currently here)
- 6 of the Most Hideous Cyber Bullying Tactics Used By Students
- 11 Communication Strategies to Combat Bullying
- 20 Ideas To Successfully Use Bully Data
- 5 Reasons Why Strong Instruction Affects Bully Prevention
- #1 Instructional Lesson for All Students on Bully Prevention
- Power of Buddy Classrooms: 19 Ideas
- 8 Ways to Teach Empathy
- 10 Ways to Empower Defenders
- 9 Reasons Culture Trumps Strategy
- One School-Wide Strategy: Kindness Campaign
Frequently Asked Questions
Who should be involved in community bullying prevention?
Start wider than parents. Local businesses, police and school resource officers, mental health providers, faith-based organizations, youth sports programs, service clubs, parent organizations, and city agencies can all take a role. The point is that students hear the same expectations from every adult in their week, not only from teachers.
What if our school has no community partnerships yet?
Ask for one small thing from one partner. Invite a community leader to speak at an assembly, or ask a nearby business to fund the printing for a poster contest. A single yes gives you something to point at when you approach the next organization, and small commitments are what most groups can actually say yes to.
Is it risky to publish bullying incident data?
It can be. Districts that rank schools by reported incidents sometimes drive families out of a building or push staff toward under-reporting, which makes the real problem harder to see. There is a privacy limit too. Anything released publicly has to avoid personally identifiable student information protected under FERPA and other applicable requirements, so share aggregated, de-identified figures and explain clearly what the numbers do and do not mean.
When is the best time to launch a community effort?
October works well, because National Bullying Prevention Month gives you a national hook and local media are already looking for the story. Our own Bully Prevention Week runs the week before Halloween for that reason. Any month beats waiting, but a national observance makes the ask easier.
- The school cannot do this alone - students spend most of their week outside your building, so the message has to follow them there.
- Ask the partners nobody asks - police, faith groups, youth sports, and service clubs say yes more often than schools expect, and each one reaches students differently.
- Small sponsorships beat big plans - printing costs, prize money, and window stickers cost a business very little and give your program visible community backing.
- Define bullying before you count it - unwanted aggressive behavior with a real or perceived power imbalance, repeated or with the potential to be repeated. Without that line, your data measures whatever staff felt like writing up.
- Celebrate the behavior you want, not the incidents you counted - recognition of kindness, empathy, and tolerance spreads among students in a way a referral tally never will.
Running an effort like this leans on skills most teacher preparation programs treat as optional: facilitating a room, reading your own data honestly, and working with people who do not report to you. The sponsored programs on this page include educational leadership and school counseling options built around exactly that work. Credential requirements for administrator and school counselor roles vary by state, including the required degree and program, supervised experience, assessments, and certificate type, so check that any program you consider meets the requirements in the state where you plan to work.
As a 5th grade teacher, in 2010 Jon won the Presidential Award for Elementary Math and Science Teaching (PAEMST). As a principal, his school won the 2012 Blue Ribbon Award. In 2018, he won the National Distinguished Principal Award (NDP). In 2019 he won the National No Kid Hungry Breakfast Hero Award.
Jon is the author of three guides published on teacher.org: An Educator's Guide to Combat Bullying & Bully Prevention; Teacher Evaluation: A Transition Guide to Exemplary Performance; and You are the Wild Card: Infusing Fun Back into Curriculum. He has authored a children's picture book that was released January 2019 titled Benjamin’s Visit to Principal Reads Office…again! (available at www.archwaypublishing.com)
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