By Michaela Christman 30 September 2015

Crouched under a staircase trying to wipe the running mascara off her tear-soaked cheeks, 10th grader Jillian Stachyra forgot she was missing her eighth-period math class.

“Jill, I think you should see this,” one of her friends had said earlier that afternoon.

Jill had been on her way to her last class of the day when her friend showed her a group chat on his phone. Taking a closer look, she saw that the group chat avatar was a photo of her face —pasted onto a whale’s body.

“I had to pretend I was okay [with what I saw] until I was alone, then I could cry,” she recalled in a recent telephone interview.

The U.S. school-based bullying rate among students ages 12-18 has hit its first decline in nearly a decade, according to a recent study done by the National Center for Education Statistics.

Twenty-two percent of students ages 12-18 reported being bullied in the NCES’s 2013 study. This number has dropped from its former range of 28 percent to 32 percent, a range that was constant back to 2005.

Though a decline in the bullying rate is positive news for students, parents, educators and prevention organizations, the 22 percent rate still reveals that more than two in every 10 students are bullied at school.

This number, of course, doesn’t include the students who were unwilling or too afraid to report their situation.

Several front-line campaigners in the battle against bullying said they hadn’t noticed a decline in their own work.

Lynette Murphy has just began her eighth school year as a social worker at Bellport High School in Bellport, N.Y. Murphy, along with two other social workers, is responsible for the counseling of some 1,400 students from grades nine through 12. She was skeptical of the reported drop.

“I don’t think there’s a decline in the bullying rate,” Murphy said. “I think it’s just easier to hide it now because of social media.”

Murphy said she gets a visit from about one student every other week who wishes to report a bullying issue. That adds up to roughly 18 students throughout the school year.

The social worker said she has not noticed a decline in the number of bullying reports, only a change in the referrals she gets. “The victims used to come more often, but now it’s usually a friend or bystander that comes to report an issue to me,” she said.

The National Center for Education Statistics conducts several types of surveys on crime and bullying in schools annually. The School Survey on Crime and Safety and the Fast Response Survey System gather data on bullying that is used in most annual reports.

Dr. Lauren Musu-Gillette, an associate education research scientist at the center, confirmed that in the most recent crime and safety survey, conducted during the 2009-10 school year, a total of 3,467 public schools were selected for the study but only 2,468 of the selected schools actually submitted data.

In the latest fast-response survey, collected in 2013-14, a total of 1,600 schools were selected and 1,350 responded to the survey, she added.

Neither of these studies include data collected from private schools.

Musu-Gillette declined to discuss the decrease in the bullying rate.

The decline in the national bullying rate is welcome news to prevention organizations, though their work has not seemed to slowed down.

PACER’s National Bullying Prevention Center, located in Minnesota, works to inspire, educate and involve individuals in anti-bullying campaigns throughout the United States.

Julie Hertzog, director of PACER’s National Bullying Prevention Center, was unable to comment on the decline in the national bullying rate.

Joe Salamone, executive director for the Long Island Coalition Against Bullying, did share some of his thoughts on the decline. Salamone said he has not noticed the drop. In fact, he said, he has noticed an increase in the number of services and packages that he’s provided to victims over the past few years.

“It may be very easy to get caught up in statistics, but to the kids and families I have spoken to who have told me their stories of torture and suicide attempts through clenched eyes and face-soaking tears, this is still a very real issue that needs attention,” Salamone said.

He said that victims are still reluctant to come forward because of the personal nature of their issues. “Some [victims] may be afraid to do so,” he said.

In a 2013 NCES study, approximately 7 percent of students ages 12–18 reported being cyber-bullied anywhere, on and off school property, during the school year. About 3 percent of students reported that another student had posted hurtful information about them on the Internet, and 3 percent reported being the subject of harassing text messages.

“It’s not like the movies where people get pushed into lockers,” 14-year-old Jill Stachyra said. “Bullying is all on social media now, which makes it harder for everyone to report it.”