By Marilyn Odendahl and Chloe White
The Indiana Citizen and TheStatehouseFile.com
January 13, 2026
Rachel Van Alstine of Elkhart just wants parents to have the chance to tell their stories.
The Parent Coalition for Child Safety and Wellness and VOICE of Peru Parents, two nonprofit, grassroots organizations founded by parents, grandparents and guardians whose children have been bullied in school, are supporting a pair of bills introduced into the Indiana General Assembly that they hope will protect children and teenagers.
The two pieces of legislation – House Bill 1093, authored by Rep. Dale DeVon, R-Granger, and House Bill 1107, authored by Ethan Manning, R-Logansport – address bullying by mandating more oversight of schools and more transparency over how they handle threats or incidents of harm experienced by students. Both bills have been assigned to the House Education Committee, but neither have been scheduled for a hearing.
Even so, Van Alstine of the Parent Coalition and members of the other parental groups remain optimistic.
“Our stories are powerful, because it’s the truth of our kids,” Van Alstine said, “and what we’re coming to testify with, I don’t know how anyone could look away.”
Already, the state has laws meant to address bullying.
Indiana Code 20-33-8-0.2 provides a definition of bullying. According to state statute, bullying is unwanted and repeated acts or gestures, including verbal, physical, or any other behaviors, that are committed by a student or group of students with the intent to harass, intimidate or harm another student and create a hostile school environment.
Notably, school corporations in Indiana are required by law to report the number of bullying incidents and student arrests to the state’s Department of Education. The DOE annually compiles the information from the schools on its website, where the public can access the information.
The education department has issued reports on bullying for the past three school years.
According to the Indiana Department of Education’s annual report on bullying, during the 2024-25 school year, a total of 6,718 events of bullying were reported, which includes physical, verbal, social and written/electronic incidents. In the prior school year, 7,700 incidents of bullying were reported, including 2,409 acts of physical violence, which was a 10-year high.
The data reported by the individual schools across Indiana varies widely. For example, during the 2024-25 school year, the 13 schools in the city of Hammond reported a high number of physical bullying occurrences, with the 108 events at Henry W. Eggers Middle School being the highest in the entire state. Comparatively, during the same time, the 48 facilities that comprise the Indianapolis Public Schools indicated that cyberbullying was the biggest problem, with the highest largest number of such bullying cases being the 16 incidents reported by Arlington Middle School.
Van Alstine raised questions about the number of school corporations reporting zero incidents of bullying. She believes that Indiana schools are incentivized to provide inaccurate or even fabricated data on bullying, because they are competing for staff, students and funding, so the school’s public image is important. The result, she said, is a “silencing culture” that discourages students and teachers from coming forward.
“The impact on our kiddos’ education is also something that’s not factored here,” Van Alstine said of bullying. “(Indiana is) retaining third graders for not being able to read, but, yet, they’re in classrooms where they can’t learn.”
HB 1107 is the first bullying legislation Manning has authored, and is his favorite kind of bill: one inspired by his constituents. Following a playground incident where an elementary-age child was allegedly assaulted by another classmate, parents and guardians of students in the Peru School District formed VOICE of Peru Parents after, they said, the school corporation failed to investigate the incident.
Following the organization’s goal to “combat discrimination, bullying, and duty neglect of the school administration, members of VOICE approached Manning to help author preventive legislation.
“In this specific situation, they had talked to the principal, they talked to the superintendent, they talked to the school board,” Manning said. “They just weren’t getting any resolutions.”
Manning’s bill would establish a state bullying ombudsman position with the Indiana Department of Education and require each school corporation to establish a bullying oversight committee. Also, the bill would allow parents or targeted students to submit complaints to that committee if they believed the school administration failed to investigate a bullying incident or the resolution of an incident was “insufficient or ineffective.”
HB 1093 incorporates pieces of two anti-bullying bills DeVon introduced during the 2025 legislative session. Although neither measure received a hearing last year, he decided to try again, he said, because bullying has changed from his childhood, when students might throw a few punches and be best friends afterward, to today’s students, who may be having to endure a constant stream of torment on social media.
DeVon’s new bill would revise the definition of bullying and require each public school, including charter schools, to document and track bullying incidents or abusive behaviors, and to implement interventions to deter or prevent bullying. In addition, the schools will have to submit an annual report on bullying incidents to the state education department and other governmental entities, starting on July 1, 2027.
To tackle the problem of bullying, DeVon said, the government needs to be proactive. He has met with and listened to the members of the Parent Coalition and, sharing their concerns about the data coming from schools, crafted HB 1093 to bolster the reporting requirement.
“We’re just trying to put a little more action into reporting and to really, truly help the kids that are being bullied,” DeVon said. “Hopefully, there (will be) some more actions and safety plans that are put into place.”
For now, both bills are awaiting their initial hearing within the House Education Committee, where members of the parental groups plan to testify in support.
The Indiana State Teachers Association said it did not have a position on either HB 1093 and HB 1107, but it is monitoring the measures to see whether either will get a legislative hearing. The Indiana Association of School Principals did not respond to a request for comment.
VOICE board member Jeri Casperson, guardian to her grandson Noah, believes anti-bullying legislation will help children throughout the state.
“I would hope that when we send our children to school that we can trust that they’re in a safe place,” Casperson said. “I would hope that we can have confidence in knowing that our education department and the schools are doing what they need to.”
Roughly 300 parents and guardians within the Peru Community School Corp. are members of the VOICE Facebook group. Unverified images posted to the group’s page show several instances of children with large welts on their arms and bumps resembling goose eggs on their heads.
Van Alstine has similar stories of students being bullied for years from elementary to high school. She described her own experience of having her son, who she said has been bullied, confess he wanted to harm himself.
“You’re literally walking on eggshells, praying to God you’re not missing something, because suicide is so real,” Van Alstine said.
The stories of students who take their own lives have galvanized the parents of the groups.
Bullying is blamed for causing 13-year-old Terry Bader III of Covington and 10-year-old Sammy Teusch, of Greenfield, to commit suicide in March 2023 and May 2024, respectively. In Elkhart, Rio’s Rainbow was founded after 12-year-old Rio Marie Allred committed suicide in March 2022. The young girl was diagnosed with alopecia, an auto-immune disease that causes hair loss, and, according to a lawsuit filed by her family against Elkhart Community School District, was subjected to verbal and psychological abuse and physical assaults by her classmates. The litigation was settled in July 2023.
Despite the struggles of bullied students, Van Alstine does not want the children and teens who are instigating the incidents to face punitive punishments. The offending students are often acting out or themselves are the victims of abuse, she said, so suspending or expelling them does not get to the root of the problem.
“I’ve worked with children for more than half my career, and these children that are exhibiting these aggressive and abusive behaviors, they need the most help,” Van Alstine said. “(They should) not be punished.”
DeVon and Manning did not include any penalties in their proposed legislation. Under HB 1093, school corporations will not face any sanctions if they fail to comply with the reporting requirements.
“We’re just trying to put a spotlight on the issue of bullying and truly trying to help,” DeVon said. “We don’t want to penalize anybody, but we just want to help.”
Manning is hopeful his bill will give parents another resource when they are trying to help their children.
“I still think there should be some additional guidance from the state, some place for parents or guardians to go if they don’t feel they are being heard at their local level,” Manning said. “The bullying ombudsman could maybe ask some questions and say, ‘Did you think about this,’ and just provide an additional outlet for folks to go if they have concerns about either specific bullying incidents, or acts of violence.”
VOICE board member Logan Morris admits to being bullied when he was a student in school.
He joined the organization, he said, after his niece had shared similar experiences in elementary school. He noted each incident of bullying can have a long-term impact.
“Our children, those are our leaders of tomorrow,” Morris said. “If you look at the statistics, there’s children out there that take their own lives because of bullying, or maybe they turn into a bully themselves… For things to continue to go in that direction, it’s not good for humanity.”
Chloe White is a reporter for TheStatehouseFile.com, a news site powered by Franklin College journalism students.
Dwight Adams, an editor and writer based in Indianapolis, edited this article. He is a former content editor, copy editor and digital producer at The Indianapolis Star and IndyStar.com, and worked as a planner for other newspapers, including the Louisville Courier Journal.
The Indiana Citizen is a nonpartisan, nonprofit platform dedicated to increasing the number of informed and engaged Hoosier citizens. We are operated by the Indiana Citizen Education Foundation, Inc., a 501(c)(3) public charity. For questions about the story, contact Marilyn Odendahl at marilyn.odendahl@indianacitizen.org.
