House Bill 688, known as the Safe Schools Act, was submitted by the Keiki Caucus to require the state Department of Education "to maintain, monitor and enforce anti-bullying and anti-harassment policies and procedures to protect students."

HB 688 has successfully passed through five legislative committees and six full floor votes and is now being deliberated in House-Senate conference.

Hawaii’s Legislature has rejected anti-bullying bills in previous years; now Hawaii remains just one of five states with no such statutes.

Last month President Barack Obama convened a conference at the White House to address bullying in schools; he specifically called upon local elected officials to join him in the effort to decrease bullying in schools. Gov. Neil Abercrombie’s comprehensive plan, "A New Day in Hawaii," had already included "safe schools" as one of his guiding principles for education reform.

The previous, elected Board of Education, as one of its last official actions, voted to support enactment of the Safe Schools Act. Some voting and nonvoting members expressed concern for the astoundingly high numbers of students who indicated that they did not feel safe at school.

According to a survey conducted by the DOE, 51 percent of Hawaii’s public high school students and 63 percent of middle school students "strongly agree or agree that harassment and bullying by other students is a problem at their school."

Not only do these statistics represent the negative impact on our students’ well being, they also represent millions of dollars worth of wasted instructional time.

The same survey revealed that 7.9 percent of high school students indicated they "did not go to school because they felt unsafe at school or on their way to or from school on at least one day (during the last 30 days before taking the survey)."

Extrapolated over the course of a school year, 7.9 percent of the student body missing at least one day a month could add up to one systemwide furlough day. Reminder: It costs taxpayers $6.5 million for the DOE to "buy back" just one Furlough Friday.

The state of Hawaii, and its Legislature, have a stake in the welfare of our public school students. Unless families have the financial resources to pay for private school, or time to homeschool their children, state laws require school age children to attend public school. This legal mandate elevates the state’s duty of care to keep students safe; for this reason, most all of the state laws related to education apply only to public schools.

While the bullying of any child anywhere is heartbreaking, the Legislature has to first ensure its state-operated schools have the proper safeguards in place. From there, our public school children will be better prepared to address bullying and cyberbullying as they encounter it in the community at large.

The Keiki Caucus’ original text of HB 688 is perfectly aligned with BOE policies, administrative rules, the DOE Safe School Community Advisory Committee’s recommendations and national best-practices. This type of vertical synthesis is exactly the kind of collaborative lawmaking Hawaii needs to effectively decrease bullying in our schools.

If the Legislature fails to pass an anti-bullying law again this year, it is continuing to send the message to the DOE that everything the DOE is doing, or not doing, about bullying in schools is "good enough." The data reflects that more than half of Hawaii’s public school students would disagree.

How bad does it need to get before the Legislature takes these pleas for help seriously?