A growing group of parents, advocates and researchers are calling for the state to take action to beef up staff training and enforcement of anti-bullying policies.
They say the state needs to bolster its efforts, especially after the federal government largely dismantled its Office for Civil Rights last year. The effort also coincides with stories of increased bullying in the state’s public schools.
“(Bullying) is underreported, underacknowledged, undervalued as an important issue for kids all across the state, particularly kids of color, particularly kids with vulnerability, disabilities and kids who might be different or seen as different by peers,” said Christa Kelleher, the research and policy director at the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy at UMass Boston’s McCormack Graduate School.
“It’s been really frustrating, a little bit infuriating and definitely disheartening to see so little action and so little attention at the state level and at the local level,” she added.
Kelleher pointed to a recent study by Northeastern University School of Law that uncovered more than a third of local schools failing to investigate bullying allegations or inform parents of how they were handling complaints despite a state law requiring such actions.
State Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell also is among those calling on local school districts. Kelleher and Campbell said a GBH News investigation focusing on bullying adds to pressure for government officials to focus on protecting children.
“This is an opportunity to think about how we do a better job,” Campbell said during a recent conversation on Boston Public Radio. “How can we make sure that it is consistent? We want more resources to be able to do that. And I am absolutely ready to engage all the stakeholders necessary to ensure that response can happen everywhere.”
In the last three years, more than 800 parents or caregivers — dissatisfied with how their local schools were handling bullying issues — filed complaints with a state oversight program, according to data obtained by GBH News. Allegations include young people who say they were beaten, slapped or called racist and antisemitic slurs over the last several years.
Among them is a mother from Lexington who reached out to GBH News to say she, too, is trying to hold her town’s school accountable for what she says was sexual harassment, stalking and cyberbullying of her then eighth-grade daughter. She says her daughter’s middle school never informed her about what they knew about the threatening behavior.
“The school was in possession of text messages indicating the student wanted to ‘punish her for telling school counselors’ and … a deeply disturbing secret Santa wish list which included toy guns and a black ski mask,’’ she wrote in an email to GBH News. “Law enforcement was contacted, however, none of this information was disclosed to us. The core failure occurred at the district level — a lack of accountability, a failure to investigate, and a failure to communicate critical safety information to parents.”
The woman, who requested anonymity for fear of affecting the investigation, said she filed a complaint last August with the federal Office for Civil Rights. The complaint says Lexington schools failed to meet federal protections against sexual harassment for her daughter. But so far, it’s yielded nothing but a few emails from an agency attorney, she said — the last one in February.
“This is a lot of you having to pester them and very vague answers in terms of them actually getting traction. There’s no satisfaction,” she said. “I still feel like we’re in this alone.”
Lexington Public Schools Superintendent Julie Hackett said in an email that the schools cannot comment on individual cases, but that the district treats student safety seriously. “Our schools follow established protocols for responding to reports of harassment and cyberbullying,” she wrote.
Last year, the Trump administration launched massive federal cuts in civil rights enforcement under the U.S. Department of Education — which shuttered more than half of its regional offices, including Boston, and fired 40% of its staff last year.
The Office for Civil Rights is responsible for enforcing a range of federal rights, including discrimination based on race, gender, and disability. However, the agency stopped updating its website of pending and resolved cases more than 15 months ago.
Officials did not respond to a request for comment. But U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders from Vermont released a report in April showing the office resolved only 1% of pending cases nationwide in 2025. It also found the office reached no agreements to protect girls facing sexual harassment or sexual violence last year.
Attorney General Campbell, who filed a lawsuit last year challenging the Trump Administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education, told GBH News that she wants both her office and the state education office to take on more cases in the wake of federal cuts.
“You have a Trump administration actively working against us to dismantle our enforcement authorities — OCR (civil rights), harassment, bullying. And so we’re called to fill the void,” she said. “We will expand that for sure. We will work with DESE (Mass. Department of Elementary and Secondary Education) and others to think about greater resources at the state level to be able to close those gaps.”
A group of legal aid organizations also is pushing the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to take on more bullying complaints left unanswered by federal regulators.
In December, the groupwrote to the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education with a range of requests, including asking officials to guide local schools on policies so parents can file civil rights complaints at the state level.
“Massachusetts needs an appropriate response to ensure families and students are still being protected … especially for civil rights issues like discrimination, identity-based bullying, and gender discrimination,” said Ashley Straker, supervising attorney of the Education Unit at the Justice Center of Southeast Massachusetts in Brockton, which is among the group.
State education officials said they are investigating civil rights complaints filed with their office, through a program called the Problem Resolution System. Alana Davidson, a spokeswoman for the State Executive Office of Education, also criticized the federal government for failing to do its job.
“The dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education, including its Office for Civil Rights, has harmed and will continue to harm students and families across the country,” Davidson said in an email to GBH News. “The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education continues to uphold its duty to protect the rights of students to access equal educational opportunities free from discrimination by investigating and resolving complaints of discrimination under federal and state law.”
But Straker and other legal-aid lawyers said after meeting with state education officials in March, they are unconvinced that the agency is doing enough.
“They don’t view their role as filling any gap that was created, and they’re not trying to become the Massachusetts branch of the Office of Civil Rights,” said Brian Dezurick, an education attorney at MetroWest Legal Services in Framingham, who met with state officials.
Diana Santiago, the legal director at the nonprofit Massachusetts Advocates for Children, said she is also unsure that the state education agency is actually going to hold schools accountable for federal civil rights laws.
“When it comes to bullying on the basis of a protected class — race-based bullying, bullying on the basis of disability, national origin — there’s really not anywhere for families to go right now in terms of a state agency to resolve these complaints outside of court and filing a discrimination claim,” she said.
Kelleher said the biggest failure in the state is that local schools are doing the bare minimum to address bullying or simply not implementing the state law.
“They are not taking proactive stances toward bullying. They are not having community conversations. They are not figuring out how to address this across the community, because bullying just doesn’t happen in school. It follows kids to the soccer fields, to the libraries, to the community centers, to the Boys and Girls Clubs, on the playground, on the school buses,” she said.
Kelleher is speaking out partly because she says her son was once a victim of bullying. Three years ago in an op-ed in the Commonwealth Beacon journal, Kelleher called for the creation of a special state commission and an interagency post that put the problem at the forefront. But no such actions were taken, she said, partly because of lack of political will and awareness of the consequences of bullying.
“We can be a state that leads here. We have to figure out a path forward before any other children self-harm, commit suicide, or don’t go to school (due to bullying),” she said.
Have a story to tell about bullying in Massachusetts schools? Email us at investigations@wgbh.org.
This article was produced with the help of the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism where Burrell was a 2025 data fellow.
