Teachers all across America reported witnessing students in their hallways and classrooms getting bullied or harassed by others following President Donald Trump's election win in 2016.
Students in Kansas, for example, taunted individuals who had diverse family backgrounds by chanting at them that they were "going back to Mexico," according to reporting from CNN. Other teachers and administrators acknowledged they saw higher incidents of bigoted vandalism occurring in their schools.
The study that produced these findings two years ago, from the Southern Poverty Law Center, was based on anecdotal rather than actual data collected about bullying. On Wednesday, however, a new study was published that confirms much of what teachers were talking about in the months after Trump won and assumed office.
Francis Huang of the University of Missouri and Dewey Cornell of the University of Virginia conducted a joint study based on a climate survey of 150,000 students across the state of Virginia. That survey asks a variety of questions, including requesting students to be candid about bullying in their schools.
Huang and Cornell looked at two years of survey data, 2015 and 2017, and found that there were higher rates of teasing in the latter year in areas that voted predominantly for Trump over his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.
