Y.C. schools examining bullying in workplace

Women are more likely than men to be perpetrators — and much more likely to be targets as well.

Workplace bullying issues were part of sessions provided to Yuba City Unified School District staff and presented by Timothy K. Baker, who teaches criminal justice at California State University, Sacramento.

"It's very similar to sexual harassment," Baker said Friday.

Herb Cooley, a Yuba City Unified trustee, attended the sessions on a safe and civil workplace held for district administrators and trustees before the start of the school year.

"I'd never been to a training like that before," Cooley said of the sessions that included workplace bullying and were presented to teachers and other staff.

"Bullying is definitely illegal," he added. "It will not be tolerated."

Workplace bullying is now a standard part of the sessions he presents, said Baker, who noted that school districts are less likely than other workplaces to face such issues.

The sessions he presented included statistics from a nationwide study that found 58 percent of workplace bullies are women and 42 percent are men.

Eighty percent of the targets of bullying are women, according to the study. Women bullying women represent 50 percent of such behavior, the study added, while 30 percent involve men bullying women.

A profile of bullying personalities found them to include "narcissistics, climbers, overachievers and disgruntled employees." Bullying is repeated, health-harming mistreatment that can involve verbal abuse, threatening behavior and sabotage that prevents work from getting done, according to the session.

Bernie Rechs, a Marysville Joint Unified School District trustee, said he is not aware of workplace bullying se sions for employees of the Marysville district. But it has expanded measures to deal with bullying by students using new communications technology, he said.

"We did change our regulations regarding bullying to include a lot of the new cyberspace and online kinds of things," Rechs said. "We're facing things we never faced before."

Nancy Aaberg, Yuba City Unified superintendent, said the school district undertook a similar expansion of regulations on student bullying. The California School Boards Association in Sacramento has assisted school districts throughout the state with cyberbullying issues, Aaberg said.

The workplace bullying session, Aaberg said, "really comes on the heels of so much attention being paid to student bullying."

Contact Appeal-Democrat reporter Ryan McCarthy at 749-4707 or rmccarthy@appealdemocrat.com.