NORTHAMPTON — A new “undercover” anti-bullying program focused on forming peer support groups to discreetly support bullied students will be implemented districtwide this school year, Superintendent of Schools Annie Azarloza announced this week.
The program, referred to as the “Undercover Anti-Bullying Team Approach,” aims to reinforce the district’s current anti-bullying protocol with a strategy described as more student-focused and restorative, according to an informational document published before Tuesday’s School Committee meeting.
“The Undercover Anti-Bullying Team Approach … brings together a small team of carefully selected peers to discreetly support a scholar experiencing bullying or social isolation,” Azarloza wrote. “Rather than relying solely on punitive responses, the approach seeks to strengthen positive peer relationships, foster belonging, and create opportunities for meaningful inclusion.”
Should a student inform school staff that they are being bullied, Azarloza explained in an interview Wednesday, the school adjustment counselor will convene a group of the student’s “influential peers,” including the alleged bully, and invite them to sit together to discuss ways to help the student.
A key detail of the program, Azarloza said, is that the bully at the table knows they are responsible, and will feel compelled and socially encouraged to change their behavior.
“The students that typically make the right decisions and are influential are saying in that group, ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t believe there’s a student treating another student like that, that’s terrible. We don’t want that to happen, right?'” Azarloza said.
She continued, “What we often forget is empathy is a learned behavior. These children might already have that empathy, while the other child, the accused bully, is still learning empathy. Now this person who’s around the team is thinking, ‘Oh wow, I’m actually the one doing these things.'”
The students, including the alleged bully, are then asked to discreetly keep an eye on and assist the bullied student — a form of positive peer pressure that Azarloza said aims to informally shift social dynamics within the school.
Azarloza told School Committee members that the district will train school adjustment counselors, psychologists and social workers on the updated procedure. She added that her administration will monitor the program’s impact and implementation throughout the school year.
School Committee member Amy Martyn said she thought the new program “sound[ed] really promising” and viewed it as an innovative approach to an “area where [the district] really needs some help.”
Martyn asked the superintendent if she had any experience implementing the new approach in other school districts, to which Azarloza responded that she had experience implementing similar policies in Worcester and Rochester, New Hampshire, and saw “great success.”
Developed in New Zealand in the early 2000s, the Undercover Anti-Bullying approach later spread to schools in the United States, including California and Massachusetts. Worcester Public Schools is among the Massachusetts districts that currently lists the approach as part of its bullying-prevention strategy.
Bullying at Northampton Public Schools has been a prominent and widely discussed issue for years, prompting statewide attention after a 16-year-old Northampton High School student took her own life in 2020 after allegedly being bullied.
Azarloza, who started as superintendent July 1, said she frequently heard complaints of bullying from the school community in her “listening and learning” tour of the district.
Having seen the protocol’s success in Worcester and Rochester, she said she almost immediately thought to implement it in Northampton, stressing the importance of early intervention in bullying cases.
“As soon as I heard that from the different stakeholders that I had been speaking with, I thought ‘OK, we need something early on, an early intervention, because you want to catch this early,” she said. “You never want it to get to the part where [a student] can’t come to school, or can’t eat.”
