Here's a letter I wrote to my school's principal about how bullying should be dealt with.

As a Class of 2013 senior, I have come to know that many schools including those of Fresno Unified School District have zero-tolerance policies for bullying. The measurement of the worth of such policies should begin with evaluating whether or not they are enforced, with adjustments then being made as needed. Even just in the two high schools I have attended, there are students who use slurs based on other students’ race, gender, sexual orientation or mental or physical ability, and when called into the office for discipline, they are let off with a warning not to do so again, sometimes even without their parents being notified. I am calling for both immediate and harsh discipline of these bullies, because failure to immediately remove intentionally harmful students from the learning environment goes against the district-wide policy of zero tolerance, or alternatively, a more honest retooling of the policy’s guidelines to outline what the schools actually intend to do about bullying.