Parents throughout the country, taking advantage of anti-bullying laws, are suing schools and winning. Judgments against schools are routinely in the hundreds of thousands-or even millions!- of dollars. A school in Tampa, Florida was recently ordered to pay $4,000,000 to parents for having failed to stop their child from being bullied. A few years earlier, a school in Anchorage, Alaska was sentenced to pay $4,500,000 for the same reason. Schools are losing and risking bankruptcy because they have virtually no ammunition with which to defend themselves, making them easy prey for parents and their lawyers. With perhaps one exception-no expert from any profession has anything negative to say about school anti-bullying laws and policies. What well-meaning parents, psychologists, educators and even principals don't realize, however, is that these anti-bullying laws, rather than helping schools, are jeopardizing them by making them legally responsible for accomplishing the impossible. Calling anti-bullying laws "an unfair assault against our schools," school psychologist Izzy Kalman offers advice in his website providing school principals and administrators with logical and research based evidence with which to defend themselves from lawsuits blaming them for failing to stop a child from being bullied.

They include:

· A survey conducted by Kalman of 4,000 mental health professionals and educators revealing that their own children get bullied by their siblings at home far more often than they get bullied by students in school.

· Research on anti-bullying programs conducted by psychologist David Smith and published in the Dec. 2004 issue of the School Psychology Review. Dr. Smith found that the great majority of anti-bullying programs either produced no benefit or made the problem worse!

· News reports from Japan, which has for ten years conducted a massive national campaign requiring schools to make bullying stop. The results?

Bullying has remained a serious problem, with school administrators fudging statistics to make it appear that they complied with government mandates to reduce bullying.

· Kalman's website manual, A Revolutionary Guide to Reducing Aggression between Children, that explains the simple dynamics by which the typical anti-bullying interventions actually lead to an increase in bullying.

With anti-bullying programs producing no benefit or making the problem even worse, how can any judge penalize a school for failing to make bullying completely disappear?

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Izzy Kalman lectures nationally to mental health professionals on anger control, bullying and relationship problems. He is the author/creator of www.Bullies2Buddies.com, author of Bullies to Buddies: How to turn your enemies into friends, and creator of the school violence reduction program, Victim-Proof Your School.