BULLYING

The 12-year-old died four months after he was found unconscious at the family home in Southend.

Students reported enduring racial slurs, the sounds of whips cracking and monkey noises as they walked down school hallways.

When Texans fan Blake Marshall contacted Jalen Pitre about his son, Mason, dealing with bullying at school, he asked the standout rookie safety if he would be be willing to wish him a happy birthday to lift his spirits.

School leaders have said they don’t tolerate racism and that they regularly train teachers how to deal with bullying. But parents say inaction by officials tells a different story.

The local sheriff is speaking straight to the smallest of students -- elementary schoolers.

Houston ISD confirmed Monday that administrators were investigating allegations of bullying at Bellaire High School, culminating in a student being beaten on campus by the same students who had been taunting him.

What is supposed to be a safe learning environment was more like a house of terror for one little girl, according to her mother.

The mother of a student who was involved in a fight at Huffman Middle School says the video that was posted online is even harder to watch.

Even before the pandemic shuttered most brick-and-mortar schools, Fusco, with the help of her parents, enrolled in an online school called Western Christian Academy. There, she's able to learn at her own pace, with no bullying kids to distract or upset her. But after millions of schoolchildren suddenly transferred to cyber school, some are finding a surprising upside: Complicated social dynamics can simplify, sometimes evaporate, as they learn online. It's not cyber bullying, in which a child is targeted for a sustained period of time, but it's behavior that causes a child to feel excluded, bruised, sad and confused. "Moreover, children who did not want to go to school because they were bullied are now flourishing with the online learning.

"Can't believe how awful kids are," Ellis Landreth, 24, wrote on Friday, explaining that her little brother was being bullied for setting up an Instagram account to review his favorite books. At the time of writing, Callum's Instagram account had more than 230,000 followers. Numerous people replied to Landreth's tweets with their own experiences of being bullied, or to express their own love of books. English novelist Matt Haig sent Callum a collection of books, adding: "Hey let's all follow Cals Book Account on Instagram and show him some support." Callum set up his Instagram account last month, posting his first review of Stephen King's "The Shining" on February 23.

Bullied at school for his dwarfism, 9-year-old Quaden Bayles sobs uncontrollably in the back of his mother's car -- saying to the camera: "Give me a knife, I want to kill myself." His mother, Yarraka Bayles, from the Australian state of Queensland, posted the heartbreaking Facebook Live video this week to raise awareness of the impact of bullying. "This is what bullying does," she said in the video. Among them is Australian actor Hugh Jackman, who posted a video message to Twitter telling Bayles: "No matter what, you've got a friend in me." "Let's show Quaden and others that there is good in the world and they are worthy of it."