Lisa Walker is a superintendent of schools in Grantham and was New Hampshire Superintendent of the Year 2022. She lives in Peterborough.

In my nearly 30 years in public education, starting as a teacher and ending as a Superintendent of Schools, I’ve pretty much seen it all. I’ve seen and dealt with student behavior of all types, and I have to say that right now, I am worried. More worried than I have ever been about our kids here in New Hampshire. It is time that we stop ignoring the elephant in the room when it comes to bullying.

The recent events unfolding out of Keene, where a middle school student took her own life after relentless bullying, have really forced me to think hard. What the heck is going on and how can we actually move the needle to support all of our children, the victims and the bullies alike?

Bullying is not a school issue. It happens during school for sure, but it happens outside of school much more. Cyberbullying is, in my professional opinion, responsible for the vast majority of bullying across the nation. There are laws in place that require schools to investigate and respond to alleged incidents of bullying (no matter where the bullying took place), employ appropriate consequences, offer remedial programs and support for the perpetrators, and support for the victims themselves.

Schools do, in fact, do this. I know that there is a perception that schools do not fulfill their legal obligation, but I can tell you they do. There are many reasons they are perceived not to, but that is an article for another day.

I want to reiterate, as someone with 30 years of experience in public education, that bullying is not a school issue. It’s not even a bully issue. It is a parenting issue.

In my experience over the years, the bullies who do not change their patterns of behavior after appropriate interventions from school officials lack parents who actually engage in parenting. They do this in many ways, some quite clear and others less obvious. I have hundreds, if not thousands, of examples of this. Here are a few:

■“Not MY kid.” Denying that their child could have possibly engaged in bullying. This includes dismissing investigation findings from the school that implicate their child as a bully.

■Failing to support the school with any actions or consequences for the bully. This includes not requiring their child to participate in any remedial programs, attend any assigned consequence like detention, or treating a school suspension like a vacation for the bully. One real-life example involved a parent taking their child out for a mani-pedi on a day they were suspended from school because ‘they didn’t deserve to be suspended’ for bullying.

■Failing to monitor their child’s behavior and interactions on social media, including failing to remove a bully’s access to these tools.

I assure you that schools are vigilantly enforcing the laws that exist to protect victims. The laws, however, do nothing to impact the behavior of the bully if the parents are giving their bully children ‘access’ to traumatize other kids by normalizing their bullying behavior. Legislation addressing parental responsibility when it comes to the bullying behavior of their children is absolutely necessary and is long overdue.

There are 365 days in a year, for a total of 8,760 hours. School is in session at most 180 days for no more than seven hours a day, for a total of 1,260 hours. Schools are with students for 14.4% of any given year. Even if you deduct eight hours of sleep a day, the scale is still very tipped — 21.6% of the time they are awake, students are in school.

Let that sink in.

Ongoing, pervasive, and destructive bullying cannot be solved by schools. It is not a school issue. I could have said ‘it is not only a school issue’, but I deliberately did not.

Schools do not condone, ignore, make excuses for, or reward bullying behavior. They do enforce laws and determine appropriate interventions stemming from bullying for the 21.6% of time out of the year students are in school. That’s not part of the problem. That’s part of the solution for a very small portion of a bully’s life.

If the other 78.4% of the time the opposite is done, effectively undoing the actions of the school, it is most certainly not a school issue.

I used to be afraid to state the obvious in my out-loud voice. I now feel it is my moral imperative to do so.

Legislators, let’s talk.