Hazing incidents will no longer fall under the category of bullying within Columbia Public Schools starting January 2027.
The Columbia School Board passed a new hazing policy during a work session Wednesday morning, alongside changes to the district’s bullying policy.
The district’s protocol for hazing incidents originally fell under policy JFCF, which addresses bullying in schools. School Board member Paul Harper, the chair of the Policy Committee, said it didn’t make sense for bullying and hazing to exist under the same policy.
“Hazing and bullying are actually two different things,” Harper said.
Removing all mention of hazing from the policy, Harper said, allowed them to better focus on the issue of bullying.
“We don’t get a lot of hazing claims, whereas we do get a lot of bullying claims,” Harper said.
The district defines hazing as any activity that would negatively affect the health or safety of a student for the purpose of membership in any group, class, organization, club or athletic team.
According to the district, examples of hazing can include sleep deprivation, physical confinement, forced conduct that may result in extreme embarrassment or criminal activity, acts of physical brutality; whipping; beating; branding; exposing to the elements; forcing consumption of any food, liquor, drug or other substance; forcing inhalation or ingestion of tobacco products; or any other forced physical activity that could adversely affect the physical health or safety of an individual.
Harper said much of the policy’s language follows the lead of the Missouri School Boards’ Association’s model policies, the association separates bullying and hazing protocol into two separate policies.
John McDonald, the chief operation officer for the association’s Center for Education Safety, said the impacts of bullying and hazing may be very different.
“We don’t typically see hazing in the early years but we do see bullying,” McDonald said.
The district’s new hazing policy now requires coaches, sponsors and volunteers to report hazing incidents alongside staff. This broadening of who is required to report incidents was also included in the updated bullying policy, Harper said.
“We wanted to make sure it was prescriptive enough that the people who may be told about hazing are also the people expected to report it,” Harper said.
He said there’s currently no plan to revisit the hazing policy unless the district receives more hazing reports.
