Living in a world of bullies: One boy tells his story

Timothy Summers has an important message for the bullies of the world: Quit picking on kids like him.

Timothy is 10 years old. He's had all he can take of taunts, pushing, hitting and cruel tricks. His head has been slammed against a bus window. Paint has been poured on his clothes. His toys have been taken away. He's been the target of vicious sexually oriented remarks. He's been forced to eat sand and been sprayed with bug spray.

Timothy Summers, a fifth-grader, has been a target since kindergarten. He's fed up, and wants the world to know how it makes him feel.

"Sad," he said. "Mad. Bad."

The idea of going public came after the March school shooting in near San Diego. Timothy's mom, Kelly, has noted how often reports about school shootings mention that the shooters had been picked on.

"Every time something like that happens, we talk about it, and how the shooters could have handled that differently," Kelly Summers said. "I'm trying to drill it into his head, 'Don't ever do anything like that.' ... I think he knows it's not an option; he's really not violent."

Those talks led to a further conversation.

"We were talking about how we wish there was something we could do to help," Summers said. "We were talking about him just writing a letter to the editor about what he's going through. ... "

Other things were happening, too. The school has taken some steps to stop the bullying, but a meeting with Timothy's principal left Summers unconvinced that the problem was solved. And Timothy's attitude toward life in general took an alarming turn.

"He was starting to make comments like it sucked to be him, and that he hated his life; he wished he could die," his mom said. "It's pretty scary to hear that coming from your son."

In light of all this, Summers called the Star Tribune. She and Timothy's father, Tim White, weren't squeamish about Timothy's identity. Use his full name. Say where he goes to school; talk to the principal. Even photographs would be OK.

"I was a little apprehensive about that, and he said, 'No, Mom, I want everyone to see me,'" Summers said.

To the adult eye, Timothy looks like a typical fifth-grader. About average height, neither heavy nor thin. He has a 9-year-old brother and an 8-year-old sister, and neither of them gets bullied.

There have been a few problems, though. Timothy has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, his mother said, which can make it tough to concentrate and control his impulses. As a result, he has to leave the classroom to take medicine, and sometimes to get extra help with math.

Still, it's not like a few years ago, when he would get carried away and have to be taken out of class. "He's just wound up," Summers said.

The disorder might make him a target. Or it could be the funny faces and weird noises he makes to try to stand out and win acceptance.

"He is trying really hard to get attention," Summers said. "I think sometimes he goes about it the wrong way."

Talking to a reporter, Timothy is a boy of few words. Often, his mother has to expand on his answers. But paraphrasing Timothy's own words, this is what his life is like:

Bullying has been part of his entire school career, spanning stints at three public schools in two districts and a Lutheran school.

He gets picked on almost daily at McKinley Elementary School in Ham Lake, mostly during recess and lunch. A bunch of kids from various grades bully him. They make fun of his hair and clothes, call him "stupid" and a "re-tard," push him and punch him.

"I get mad at them," Timothy said, but he tries not to hit back because he's afraid he'll get in trouble. Once kids made fun of his dog getting killed by a truck.

"They were making faces and noises of a dog getting hit," Timothy said.

And they have made him the target of crude sexual remarks.

Yearning for friends

He gets a break during class.

"They don't tease me there because they can't talk while the teacher's talking," he said.

All this would be easier to take if there were friends to turn to. In Timothy's case, there are none.

"He did have one friend for maybe a week or two," Summers said. "And this kid started getting harassed and teased because he liked Tim and he was talking to Tim."

Going home at the end of the school day is also a break of sorts. And so is summer. But getting away from the bullies is only half a solution.

"I don't have any friends to go play with," he said.

"Most of the time he sits at home, and his brother and sister will get the phone calls coming in, or call people, but he doesn't," Summers said. "No one asks him to go anywhere or do anything. He doesn't get invited to birthday parties. We don't give him birthday parties anymore because kids would say they were coming and nobody would show up."

If all this sounds bad, the one consolation is that it used to be worse.

When he lived in Columbia Heights, the neighborhood kids who bullied Timothy also rode the same school bus even though they went to different schools. There, kids made him eat sand and bug-sprayed him. They stole his toys and tied his shoes together on the bus so he couldn't get off. They splashed paint on him.

Finally, after calls to school officials, social workers, the bus company, his special-education teacher and even the police, Timothy was switched to a bus that transported special-education kids. Ultimately, the family moved to Andover just to give Timothy some relief.

"We just figured this would be a better area for him," his mother said. "It would be safer. There are really no kids around here."

Summers put Timothy and his brother and sister in a Lutheran school, but soon discovered she couldn't afford the tuition, and returned them to public school. Even at the Lutheran school, Timothy said, "they still teased me."

Efforts to stop it

There are some silver linings to the cloud that seems to hang over Timothy. McKinley Principal Bonnie Johnson and her staff have worked to stop the most recent round of teasing, and have punished Timothy's worst tormentors. Johnson said the parents of some of the bullies want the bullying stopped, too.

Timothy says things have improved somewhat. He is in a church youth group now, and enjoys it.

But next year, he will go to middle school. Already, he said, kids have threatened to beat him up there. That has Summers thinking about other options: home schooling, enrolling Timothy in another district or biting the bullet and putting him back in private school.

A plea for kindness

Said Summers: "Every parent, they have this idea in their head when their child is born, they're holding that baby, and they have all these plans for this child, and I just feel the longer this is going on he's losing sight of his dreams. He doesn't talk much about his future, or anything. He's sad most of the time. He just really hasn't been himself for a long time."

What does Timothy hope to accomplish by telling his story?

"If it's put in the paper, they'll see it and they'll stop," he said. He wants the bullies of the world to know that "it's not cool to pick on kids." And that they could get picked on themselves someday.

But what if making his story known doesn't improve things? What if it makes things worse?

Said Summers: "His words were, 'I don't care; I want everybody to know what they're doing.'"

-- Norman Draper is at ndraper@startribune.com .