Calls for change at Park Forest Middle School after teen’s suicide put bullying in spotlight

In the days after a 14-year-old Park Forest Middle School student died by suicide on May 12, as shocked students and teachers continued to grieve, reports of bullying ran rampant through the hallways.

Over three weeks, the State College Area School District received 27 reports from Safe2Say, the youth violence prevention program run by the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office. And, on May 16, district superintendent Curtis Johnson issued a note to families , asking students not to spread misinformation or rumors.

In that same note, Johnson wrote that the parents of Abby Smith were not aware of her being bullied and did not believe it was the reason for her death by suicide.

But Jonathon Smith, Abby’s father, said that was incorrect and the family’s thoughts were misinterpreted.

“I don’t know what their intent was,” Smith told the Centre Daily Times.

“But the way they phrased it made it seem like we didn’t think any bullying happened. And when we sent out the follow-up email, we tried to make it very clear that we don’t know.”

On May 24, Abby Smith’s family released a statement through the school district, pleading for anyone with information to come forward. So far, two students have contacted the family with firsthand accounts of bullying regarding Abby. There also were several other secondhand accounts.

“It’s hard to know,” Smith said in regards to Abby being bullied. “And while I do believe the people who said it, we still need — there still needs to be evidence to be able to prove it in some way.”

The investigation into Abby’s death has continued. But in interviews with her father and four current and former Park Forest students and their parents, concerns have emerged about the culture at the middle school and the processes in place to report bullying.

Students said they’ve experienced emotional and verbal bullying at the school — often without the kind of physical evidence the school district asks for when conducting their investigations. The bullying has also left an impact on students’ mental health, with some saying reporting it sometimes made the situation worse because of retaliation from other students.

Alicia Musheno is a parent of a State High student who was bullied at Park Forest Middle School, and she also has a son she pulled out of the middle school last year because of it.

The district needs to focus on supporting and believing victims of bullying, even when physical evidence isn’t available, Musheno said.

“Maybe there isn’t hard evidence, but it’s having a negative effect on their emotional health, their physical health, their psychological health,” she said. “It’s damaging them, and then the parents are left to pick up the pieces.”

In an early June interview with the Centre Daily Times, then-SCASD’s Director of Student Services Jeanne Knouse insisted the district is doing everything it can to investigate and stop bullying when it occurs.

Due to student privacy concerns and policies, she said, the district cannot comment on any student punishment or the outcome of bullying investigations.

“You have to trust that we’re doing our job,” Knouse said.

“We’re in this job because we care about kids. We’re human beings who have kids ourselves, right? We don’t want anyone to suffer, anyone to feel bad at school, to struggle with mental illness, to be bullied.”

‘An easy target’

Huiwon Lim, the father of Sofia, a rising ninth grader, said he believes bullying is a larger issue at the school, and students — like his daughter — are reluctant to speak with parents or administrators about their experiences.

“They are talking to each other about what they saw, what they heard and what happened to them, but they don’t want to talk to all the other parents and to counselors,” he said.

While district administrators have emphasized the sharing of evidence — screenshots, text messages, etc. — several students who spoke to the CDT say the bullying usually occurred in person, often from a select few students.

Sofia Lim, who was friends with Abby and one of the students who contacted her family, described her experience this past school year as a covert campaign of harassment, hard for teachers or administrators to spot. Taunting remarks in homeroom before classes started, spreading rumors and snide comments, compounded for months on end.

For Sofia, it was one student in particular who was behind the bullying.

“She would, like, pretend to be all playful and not make it obvious that it was bullying,” Sofia said. “And then from the teacher’s perspective, it would look like we were just messing around.”

Some of the comments were racially motivated toward Sofia, who is Korean, but she said she didn’t believe that was the reason for the bullying.

Her best guess as to the cause of the bullying? Accidentally wearing a similar outfit as the other girl during the early days of the eighth grade.

“People were saying that I was just an easy target,” Sofia said.

A Park Forest Middle School student and friend of Abby Smith, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said she and another friend were subjected to continuous bullying comments this spring by a group of boys and girls in several of their classes.

What started out as the group teasing her for a perceived crush on a boy in the class quickly became something sharper, targeted toward the two girls, the student said.

The student said when she approached the guidance counselor and three teachers about her concerns, the responses varied greatly. One teacher took the bullying concerns seriously, making an effort to tell the group to stop and reassured the student that bullying wouldn’t be tolerated in the classroom.

But another teacher, the student said, inadvertently caused the girls’ situation to become far worse.

“She did tell them to stop and then she turned to us and said, ‘Hey look, I did it,’” the student said. “And they were able to hear that, and it just made things a whole lot worse because they were like, ‘Oh my god, you tattled on us.’”

Sofia said she reached out to her guidance counselor on two separate occasions this spring about the girl she’d been having problems with, once after an altercation in a school bathroom during lunch. Sofia said the counselor talked to the student, but later she became aware of more rumors about her spreading through the school.

The district said they did investigate this incident. It was brought to the principal and both students were found to be at equal fault, said Knouse, who was the district’s director of student services until she retired at the end of June.

Sofia’s experiences with reporting bullying to teachers and counselors mirrors what other students fear about speaking out — that it will only make the bullying worse. It’s something school officials are aware of as well.

Knouse said “snitches get stitches” is a very real mentality that lives on in schools when it comes to reporting bullying and other actions.

The anonymous Safe2Say reporting hotline was implemented in all schools statewide in 2019. Since 2021, the district has received 864 Safe2Say reports, nearly 200 of which were deemed life-threatening, Knouse said.

But she acknowledged there’s a problem with trust with the program that stems from its anonymity.

“The issue is they report something and they never hear back and they’re not going to because we take the case we don’t know who to report back to because it’s anonymous,” Knouse said. “But we take every single case and investigate it, but they don’t know the consequences of that report.”

How does SCASD address bullying?

Alicia Musheno’s daughter, Madison, 17, said bullying isn’t a new problem at Park Forest Middle School. When she was a student there, she had a friendship that she said quickly devolved into being bullied for her looks, weight and family’s socioeconomic status.

“It started off just as a joke,” Madison said. “But then it slowly got worse and worse and then progressed and she was calling me fat; making fun of the way I look.”

Alicia Musheno said the administrators tried to mediate conversations between the girls, but stayed away from directly addressing the conflict as bullying.

“They didn’t even really use a term,” she said. “They just kind of said it was girls not getting along.”

Despite multiple meetings with both sets of parents, counselors and administrators, the conflict between the girls was unable to be resolved. Both Alicia and Madison felt the school was unwilling to escalate the issue without tangible, physical proof of bullying, leaving both parties at an impasse.

“That’s kind of where it fell into, where [the district] was really like, ‘Is this really happening?’” Alicia Musheno said. “Is it really bullying because there’s no hard evidence?”

After Abby Smith’s death by suicide, Johnson’s note to families asked for community members to submit screenshots or other evidence of bullying. When Abby’s parents addressed the school district community, they asked for people to come forward with any information — whether they witnessed something online or an in-person act.

“Both small and large acts can contribute to a pattern of bullying,” her parents wrote. “The more information we have, the better we can understand the complete picture of what did or did not happen.”

Knouse said that when bullying is reported, administrators investigate reports and try to collect evidence, but it becomes difficult when physical evidence is not present. In cases where physical evidence isn’t present, Knouse said the district relies on reports from other people.

“That’s hard — the ‘he said, she said’ kind of thing,” she said.

“And so the only thing we can do is document that we talked to them, how many times we’ve talked to them, if we’ve gone further in the investigation, talk to their friends and the other person’s friends, talk to teachers.”

Knouse said two key factors that administrators look for when determining cases of bullying is the balance of power and if events are “pervasive over time.”

“A lot of times kids think they’re coming in with bullying and it ends up being a one-time kind of an incident or a fight between two people,” Knouse said. “And so that’s one of the things that is tricky and hard to determine if that’s the case or not.”

But Henry Brzycki, president of the State College counseling and development organization Brzycki Group, said even a one-time incident can have a deep emotional impact on a student.

“It’s a matter of degree, sometimes one time ... is emotional abuse and bullying that requires support for the one that was bullied,” said Brzycki, an educational psychologist with more than 40 years of experience. “So it depends on the degree of the one-time versus ongoing incidences.”

Knouse said teachers are trained to spot bullying through the district’s social emotional learning curriculum — and they’re improving.

Three years ago, 59.1% of students reported that teachers stopped bullying when they saw it. That number rose in 2023 to 73.4%, according to data provided by the school district.

“We’re doing a better job of making sure teachers are aware in stopping this,” Knouse said. “Like, you need to stop this when you see it, or, make the report or and reinforce our preventative measures and reinforcing the reporting.”

But still, Knouse acknowledged that administrators cannot control the actions of every teacher. While it’s school policy for teachers to report any bullying to school counselors or principals, she said some may choose to handle it on their own.

“If someone confides in them that they’re being bullied, the teacher then has an obligation to make sure that that process is followed through with — so whether it’s going to the school counselor or to the administrator to make sure that that’s taken care of,” she said.

When bullying does occur, schools can sometimes misuse conflict resolution strategies in attempts to resolve the problem, according to Pacer’s national bullying prevention center . Encouraging students to “work it out” can send the message that both students are partially responsible for the bullying.

In Madison’s experience, the “work it out” approach only made things worse.

Rhonda C. Boyd, an associate professor of clinical psychology in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said research-based evidence for bullying programs is mixed.

But keeping victims of bullying safe is always a priority.

“With a youth who has been a victim of bullying, it is important to make their environment safe and to stop the bullying,” she wrote in an email to the CDT. “If they have mental health problems, then they may need specific counseling for those symptoms.”

A lasting impact

Madison’s experiences with bullying ended when she graduated and moved to State High, a benefit of a larger school and a new set of peers. However, her younger brother has experienced a similar hardship at her former middle school.

The 13-year-old has experienced both in-person and cyberbullying from a group of peers at Park Forest, his mother, Alicia Musheno, said.

The bullying got so bad that he struggled to go to school in the mornings, sometimes refusing to enter the school at morning drop-off. Alicia Musheno said she repeatedly met and emailed administrators to try and find a way to make her son feel safer at school, but was unable to find a solution.

“It was so bad every morning,” Madison said.

“He’s like, ‘I’m gonna kill myself. I can’t be here. I hate it so much. I just want to die.’ It was so sad and heartbreaking to see ... it really just makes me so angry because there’s so many opportunities to help him and no one did anything.”

The school district has said it cannot discuss specific situations involving students.

In November, he moved to an alternative school and has no plans to return to Park Forest, Alicia Musheno said. But he’s still not happy. The bullying has left a deep impact on not only his mental health but the entire family’s.

“It is so frustrating and daunting, and just absolutely it’s heartbreaking,” she said.

“I’m glad that he is in the right program. It’s a lot better for him, but at the same time, it’s still a struggle every morning to get him to come out of bed and go to school. It’s tough. It wears on the entire family really.”

Several students interviewed for this article sought in-patient treatment, outside counseling or began classes online after experiencing bullying at Park Forest.

Even before the death of her friend, Sofia said the bullying had gotten so bad she had already started to consider taking her own life. Two days after her friend’s death, Sofia attempted suicide, citing the bullying and the loss of Abby as a main contributor.

“Even before Abby’s passing, I was thinking about it,” Sofia said. “The bullying on top of Abby’s passing kinda led up to that.”

Although most bullying cases don’t lead to suicide, both victims and bystanders can experience severe impacts to mental well-being. Bystanders have even been shown to have signs of greater psychological stress than students who were bullies or victims.

“I ended up going somewhere for about two weeks to help me and well, while I was there, I realized that I need to not be in school because of all this,” the eighth grade student who spoke under the condition of anonymity said. “Bullying put me in a really bad place.”

Boyd, the associate professor of clinical psychology, said parents who see a change in their student’s behavior and worry it may be bullying should look for signs of withdrawal, depression, anxiety, problems sleeping or substance abuse.

“Children may become disengaged in school or another setting in which bullying is happening,” she wrote in an email. “They may begin exhibiting mental health symptoms mentioned earlier or experiencing more unexplained physical symptoms, such as stomachaches and headaches.”

State College Area School District does have resources to help students struggling with mental illness, including helping provide access to psychiatric care when necessary. Knouse said the district often shares a Google form with students, families and staff so the school community can inform administrators of students who may be struggling with mental health.

She said the list of students are monitored so staff can be aware of those in need of additional support.

“We know that these people are already struggling and it may have been because of what happened or maybe because of something that happened in their own life that brings back stuff,” Knouse said. “And so we’re keeping that ongoing list so that we can check in and out with people.”

Changing the culture

Although the school year is over, the grief and anger over their experiences still lingers for students. Despite leaving Park Forest Middle School, the student who asked to remain anonymous said she worries for ninth grade and whether State High will be able to step in if the bullying resumes when classes begin again on Aug. 27.

“I’m really hoping that they get their act together, and if I need to tell someone like a counselor that this is happening, that they’ll be able to do something more and be able to stop it from happening,” the student said.

In an early June interview, Knouse did not indicate any radical changes to the way the district handles bullying policy or procedure were in the works. She did say, however, a new behavioral curriculum focused on improving students’ social and emotional interactions would be implemented for the fall in the middle schools.

The curriculum change was discussed by the board in May prior to Abby’s death and allegations of bullying.

Knouse also said the district would be more proactive in ensuring students understood how the reporting process worked and highlighting the issue during Suicide Awareness Month in September.

Despite parent and student concerns, Knouse said there is no evidence to support a pervasive bullying problem at Park Forest Middle School, but she acknowledges there might have been a “pervasive situation” involving bullying at the end of the school year.

“Anyone who’s bullied is not OK, so it’s gonna feel that way,” Knouse said.

“...We’re coming off a high emotional kind of situation or traumatic event, you’re going to hear from a group — so the evidence that I have right now, it doesn’t support that there’s a pervasive problem.”

Smith, who continues to search for answers about his daughter’s death, would like to see the school update its policies. Those affected should be kept better informed about bullying investigations so students feel their concerns are being taken seriously, he said.

“Because if you think that you reported it, and nothing happened, are you going to report it again? No. But if you think that you reported it, and they’re still looking into it, and it happens again? Well, now you’re probably pretty likely to report it and say, ‘Hey, this is still happening,’” he said.

Knouse said the district cannot share information about other students’ disciplinary measures for privacy reasons, which makes sharing details about the outcome of investigations into bullying difficult.

While Smith understands the district’s legal position, he said the policy can be damaging to the students who are being bullied.

“If we only protect the bullies, or the accused bully, what about the kids who are getting bullied?” Smith said.

“And I feel like school in general seems to take the legally sound, but emotionally wrong position of just withholding everything and doesn’t solve the problem, but it keeps them safe legally.”

Musheno said she hopes the district focuses less on having hard evidence when it comes to bullying and more on understanding the social and emotional impact it has on students.

“They need to realize it is happening and believe these kids and do something about it,” she said. “And I know it’s hard to punish the kids, but there needs to be true change and true help.”

She’s hopeful that new Park Forest administrators can make a difference at the school, pointing to positive experiences with new assistant principal Tina Greene.

“I guess I am kind of optimistic that maybe there will be some change … she is great,” Musheno said. “And she has been great with (my son) and she works really well with that. And so I am optimistic that there could be some change there.”

With the school year over and the eighth-grade class preparing to move to State High this fall, the Lim family doesn’t want their experiences at Park Forest Middle School to be forgotten.

They can’t — Sofia’s brother will start at the school in the fall.

“The reason why we are working really hard on this situation is to make a better space for our kids,” Lim said. “Not only for my daughter, but I have three more kids that will go to school.”

SUICIDE PREVENTION RESOURCES

Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988 or chat at 988Lifeline.org

Center for Community Resources: Visit 2100 E. College Ave., State College, 24/7

HOW TO REPORT/RESPOND TO BULLYING

Stopbullying.gov , a website managed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, lists to following resources for those experiencing bullying:

If there has been a crime or someone is at immediate risk of harm: call 911

If someone is feeling hopeless, helpless, thinking of suicide : see resources above

If someone is acting differently than normal, struggling to complete tasks or not able to care for themselves: Find a local counselor or other mental health services

If a child is being bullied in school: Contact the teacher, school counselor, school principal, district superintendent, state Department of Education. In Pennsylvania, students can submit an anonymous tip at www.safe2saypa.org .

If the school is not adequately addressing harassment based on race, color, national origin, sex, disability or religion: Contact the superintendent, state Department of Education, U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Right , U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division