20 School Districts with the Most Bullying Incidents; Brick, Lakewood On List

Last week we put together a list of the 9 Most Violent School Districts in New Jersey. What we tried to do in that list was to use the same statistical analysis for incidents of violence in schools as we would for municipal crime stats. In other words, if one town had 40 assaults and 10,000 people, while another town had 300 assaults and 100,000 people, the former would actually have a higher rate of assaults.

Today, we’ve compiled the 20 School Districts with the Most Bullying Incidents for the 2012-2013 school year. For this list, we kept ratios out of the equation and simply went with raw numbers. Not surprisingly, Newark had the most bullying incidents since it has the largest student body in the state. But there are some surprises further down the list.

Again, all of this data is pulled from the state of New Jersey’sViolence, Vandalism and Substance Abuse in the Schools Report.

As with any data, there are some important points to remember, and the most important point here is that this data is self-reported by the districts. That’s why Paterson, with its 24,000 students, only reported one incident of bullying last year. The other point is that the reporting category is called “Harassment, Intimidation and Bullying,” which we’ve shortened to simply “bullying.”