HILLTOWNS — As Berne-Knox-Westerlo continues to make strides toward creating an ideal environment for its students, one mother who claims her two sons — 15 and 13 years old — have been continuously bullied for years is critical of what she perceives as a lack of meaningful intervention by the rural district.

Her complaints echo those from former students whom The Enterprise recently learned still resent how their own bullying was handled, years after graduating. 

While Superintendent Bonnie Kane told The Enterprise that she couldn’t address specific allegations, except to say that they are “one-sided and contain inaccurate information,” the mother and her sons — whose names are being withheld for their privacy — describe incidents of assault, property theft and damage, verbal harassment, and dismissal of these incidents by district staff. 

“Administrators take their role in preventing bullying and supporting all students very seriously,” Kane said. “Each year, district staff and faculty participate in yearly training to ensure they are up-to-date on items related to assisting and reporting disciplinary issues and student concerns.”

She added that personnel are also obligated to annually review the Dignity for All Students act, a state anti-bullying law. 

The mother, meanwhile, says that teachers have been obstructive and hostile toward both her sons. 

The 15-year-old, who’s in 9th grade, described to The Enterprise one incident where a student slapped him in front of a teacher and, although he had immediately walked out of the room and wasn’t sure exactly how the teacher responded, knew that the student who slapped him wasn’t sent to the principal’s office.

The boy’s mother said that the same teacher told her son she “didn’t like him” after a separate bullying incident.

That teacher could not be reached for comment.

Kane told The Enterprise that the district “had not been made aware of these allegations. Teachers are aware that they have an obligation to report any issues or concerns when it comes to the health and safety of our students.”

Another teacher, the mother said, refused to move the 15-year-old’s seat away from a student who was bullying him in class, as had been agreed upon in a superintendent’s meeting.

“Every time he does [move his seat], and goes and sits somewhere else, the teacher will tell him — pretty much yells at him — to go back and sit in front of that [student] he’s not supposed to sit in front of,” the mother said. 

Kane, who said that she could not get into the specifics of any meetings she had with the family, said that administrators “have discussed this issue with the teacher in question.” 

Both boys told The Enterprise that their bullying started around 4th or 5th grade, and for each has involved the same core group of students. Neither knew why their bullies picked on them specifically. 

The younger son, who’s 13 and in 8th grade, said that he’s “on the shorter side,” and gets picked on for his height. Teachers will step in when they hear verbal harassment, he said, but are ignorant to the fact that it sometimes gets physical. 

“They’re taking my stuff, they’ve pushed me into walls and lockers, and stuff like that,” the 8th-grader said of his bullies, adding that teachers are “not really helpful.”

According to emails between the mother and dean of students Tom Galvin, who is also the district’s athletic director, which the mother shared with The Enterprise, the 8th-grader had his cell phone and other belongings stolen and scattered during sports practice. 

“He found his crocs up the stairs and in the bathroom, he found his phone, again, in the bathroom sink,” the mother wrote, “his gatorade was thrown and his sweatshirts in the lost and found. I’m asking you to look at the cameras and see who stole his things and vandalized them.” 

She said the phone was broken and that she would need to buy a new one.

The mother also says that her sons are being falsely blamed.

According to other emails between the mother and Galvin, the younger son had been accused by a female student of touching her leg on the bus in a way that, in Galvin’s words,  made “this young lady uncomfortable.” 

“We have talked to [your son] about boundaries and will be having him sit upfront near Coach Stempel moving forward,” Galvin wrote. 

The mother initially responded that she, too, would talk to her son about personal boundaries but followed up the next day to say that the allegations were false, and part of a scheme among the boys’ bullies to get him in trouble. 

“I am not sure if this is true or not, but if this is the case, this was blown WAY out of proportion, and they are just trying to get [my son] in trouble,” the mother wrote in her email to Galvin. She asked that district staff try to review camera footage any time her sons are accused of misbehavior.

Galvin, citing the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, declined to comment. 

The older son, meanwhile, had been suspended for drawing a swastika on a popsicle stick and putting it in another student’s locker. He acknowledged to The Enterprise that he had done this, but claimed that he was forced to do it by one of his bullies, who then “snitched” on him. 

It was after this incident that he and his mother first met with Kane, where the mother said it became clear to her that Kane was not aware of the extent of the bullying the 15-year-old was enduring. 

The 15-year-old said that the district had initially been skeptical of his account of the swastika incident and he had been suspended for 30 days, but that the suspension was shortened after the superintendent’s meeting, where the boy said his claims were taken more seriously. 

The mother said the district has also offered to create a mutual “stay-away” order between her son and the student whom he says forced him to draw the swastika. She said this would be an enforceable order, with pre-determined consequences for violating it, but that she was “hesitant to sign it because this will allow them to turn it around on my son for any reason when he is the victim.”

While Kane said she was not able to comment on specific incidents or meetings, she did say that students’ behaviors and rights are governed by the code of conduct, which is “reviewed yearly by our Shared Decision Making Committee — a committee of staff members and community members. At the start of the year, all middle and high school students meet with building administration to review the code of conduct and our district’s expectations.”

The student code of conduct also lays out disciplinary procedures, which Kane said is typically progressive and factors in “many different things,” such as: the student’s age; the nature of the offense and the circumstances which led to the offense; the student’s prior disciplinary record; the effectiveness of other forms of discipline; information from parents, teachers, or others, as appropriate; and other extenuating circumstances.

Lasting impact

To explore the long-term effects of bullying, The Enterprise spoke with two former BKW students who also had accused the district of ignoring their claims, which The Enterprise had covered at the time. 

Hailey Wisler was bullied so much at BKW, she says, that she left the school in 2017. Now 21, she lives in Altamont with her boyfriend and recently had a modeling portfolio produced in New York City. 

Wisler said she still doesn’t know why she became a target to other kids, but that the bullying started in 4th grade, with little help to be found from adults over the years. 

She said when the school did take action, it was at her inconvenience. For instance, moving her out of her regular classroom to create distance from the students bullying her. 

“I don’t know why,” Wisler said, of the district’s lack of support. 

One thing she said the school didn’t do for her at the time that may have helped was put her in touch with the school’s mental health counselor — something that was available but that she didn’t know to ask for. 

“Kids are always kids and they’re mean, but you can give them the right tools so that it’s not going to affect them or stick with them,” Wisler said. “If I was talking to a therapist then, maybe it wouldn’t affect me so much now.” 

All these years later, the impact remains. 

“After you’re picked on so severely and badly, you just feel like everyone hates you and everyone’s out to get you,” she said. “Like, if someone’s whispering over there, it’s about me, so it does affect you, and it’s always with you.” 

She said she knew at the time that the experience was going to be a trauma, even though one of the few helpful adults in her life — her mother — had tried to assure her that the pain would be temporary. 

“It doesn’t affect me daily, but I have anxiety and it stems from that [experience],” Wisler said. “When I’m sad, I do think about those things.” 

Like Wisler, Mackenzie Dunnells left BKW because of bullying. Just before leaving the district, at age 12, she had attempted suicide when the stress reached a boiling point. Dunnells, now 21, lives in a neighboring county, and works as a manager at a fast-food restaurant.

Dunnells said this week that the BKW administration at the time she was a student “failed me 100 percent.” 

She described, as an example, an incident where a group of girls ran in front of her in the school hallway then stopped so that she would run into their backs.

“Next thing I know, the principal called me down to the office and literally threw me in [in-school-suspension] for three days, telling me I did it on purpose,” Dunnells said. “I started getting punished for them bullying me.” 

She said that the students who bullied her were “favorites” of some of the district staff.

When asked what she wished staff members had done to help her, Dunnells responded, “Literally anything they were supposed to do.” 

She said her mom kept a composition book filled with incidents she had logged, the fullness of which is a stark contrast to the minimal number of bullying incidents that BKW typically reports to the state each year under the Dignity for All Students Act. 

“From the time I was in fourth grade until the time I was in seventh grade, [my mom logged] every incident,” Dunnells said. “Every time I went to the principal with her, my mom asked them to pull out all the bullying forms. They didn’t fill a single one out any time I went to them with a complaint.” 

After leaving BKW and being homeschooled for a year, Dunnells went back to the district, but the bullying resumed, she said, and she only made it three days before she hit another breaking point.

“I had finally had enough of just letting these girls do whatever they wanted to me,” she said. “At that point it was well over a year after my suicide attempt, and I was still having problems with the same group of girls, even after they didn’t see me for some odd months.”

All the pain she had experienced at that point turned to anger, she said, and she “started fighting them.” 

Dunnells said she advises current students to look for support outside of school, whether it’s through a church or some other community organization, “because that’s exactly what my mom did for me.” 

After Dunnells’ story went public in The Enterprise for the first time in 2016, she said her mom’s phone “was blowing up for weeks — weeks and weeks straight — by other parents talking about how their kids were getting bullied and the school wasn’t doing anything about it for their child either.” 

 Kane — who was promoted from a high school English teacher at the district to high school principal in 2021, and then from principal to superintendent in 2024 — declined to comment on the experiences of Dunnells and Wisler.

District initiatives

It was around the time that Dunnells attempted suicide that the district found its first long-term superintendent in decades, Timothy Mundell, who was the one who addressed bullying at BKW when parents railed against the school for inaction — though Paula Dunnells, Mackenzie’s mother, told The Enterprise in 2016 that listening to one such presentation “made her blood boil.”

Since the early days of his tenure, which began in 2015 — and with the help of a substantial annual state aid package — the school has evolved tremendously as it reinvented itself around the concept of social-emotional learning, incorporating students’ psychological needs into the traditional academic curriculum. 

Among other things, the district was the first in the state to become a “trauma-skilled” school, in 2023, an accreditation earned through the National Dropout Prevention Center. 

The skills learned from the center are meant to help the district give its students structure, organization, and resilience as they balance personal hardships — which are often described as adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs — with their potential for achievement, The Enterprise wrote at the time.

“It can be child abuse, or domestic violence in the home, or just constant arguing or bickering, or drug or alcohol abuse, sex abuse …,” Mundell told The Enterprise then. “All of these things, they’re not just things that happen to people who live in poverty. These are things that can happen to all of us in our lives. We all have trauma in our lives that we have to overcome and be resilient to in order to succeed.”

Mundell retired from the district last year, with Kane — whom he mentored — taking over, and suggesting in her first interview with The Enterprise as superintendent that she aimed to continue the momentum that the district built up under Mundell. 

With regard to bullying, Kane told The Enterprise last month that “the district has a robust and research-based social-emotional learning curriculum that it utilizes with students throughout their educational career. This year, the district has also secured grant funding to further those efforts with new curricular materials. The district works to create opportunities for students to understand the importance of creating positive relationships with peers. 

“A key component of that is the No Place for Hate program,” she said, “which builds opportunities for workshops, speaking opportunities, and activities to prevent disciplinary issues or the potential for bullying. Recently, we featured this program in our winter newsletter for families to showcase opportunities to build communication and empathy between students.”

Asked why bullying seems to be more prevalent at the district, based on the number of incidents that have been reported to The Enterprise over the years, Kane said, “It’s difficult to summarize which districts experience disciplinary issues more than other regional schools. School administrators can often experience different levels of disciplinary issues within their school community.”

Kane said that being a small district allows it to build a stronger community.

“Our close-knit community is one of the characteristics that sets our school apart,” Kane said. “Through our comprehensive outreach programs, we work to equip students with essential coping mechanisms, empowering them to seek support when needed. As a small district, we benefit from the ability to foster strong, collaborative relationships between our school and parents/caregivers. This enhances communication, ensuring that each student’s unique needs are met with compassion and precision.”

She said the district’s “dedicated team of administrators, guidance staff, educators, aides, and support personnel collaborates thoughtfully to foster meaningful social-emotional connections within our campus.”

“Additionally,” Kane said, our district maintains a close partnership with our School Resource Officer, who has cultivated strong relationships with both staff and students, allowing for a deeper understanding of concerns, as they emerge, and the most effective ways to address them. 

“Through active listening, continuous learning, and purposeful action, we strive to create a lasting, positive impact on our school community,” she said. “This commitment enables us to cultivate a safe, supportive, and productive environment where students, faculty, and staff can continuously learn and feel supported.”