A tiny Southwest Michigan school district with just 288 students reported 454 incidents of bullying in a recent school year. About 140 miles to the east, the state’s largest school district has 50,210 students, and it reported only five incidents.

The Michigan Department of Education recently released its report on the number of bullying incidents in 2017-18, and it shows a tremendous disparity in what is being reported around the state. It was the second year that the state has tracked information on bullying, which school districts are required to submit to the department under a bill that became law in 2014.

There were 200 school districts out of 888 traditional school districts and charter school buildings that reported no incidents of bullying in 2017-18. Some of these reports were inaccurate or erroneous. For example, Grand Rapids Public Schools, which had 16,298 students, didn’t report a single case of bullying.

But according to Grand Rapids Public Schools spokesman John Helmholdt, the district actually experienced 150 reportable incidents of bullying or harassment last school year. Helmholdt said there was a technical error in the reporting that the district was working to fix.

The Detroit Public Schools Community District, which reported just five incidents of bullying, cited the transition from state control as a reason for its low number.

“As has been described, several systems and processes were lacking under emergency management, along with proper monitoring and accountability,” said district spokeswoman Chrystal Wilson. “Inputting incidents was an example. The new administration noted this and created a task force to update the Code of Conduct and trained school-level leadership this past spring on the Code and reinforced the need to input all incidents in the database. The inputting of incidents in the database has already improved this year.”

Statewide, there were 16,093 incidents of bullying reported in 2017-18.

The Lansing School District, which had 10,604 students, reported 590 bullying incidents.

“Lansing encourages reporting. Information is important for responsive action,” said Robert Kolt, spokesman for the district.

The Michigan Department of Education is required to provide districts with a form and procedures, but department officials said they have no authority to verify the accuracy of the information that districts turn in.

“State law requires districts to report bullying incidents, but allows for self-reporting and local control of the results,” said Bill Disessa, spokesman for the Michigan Department of Education. “The law gives MDE no verification authority over reported data.”

Disessa added that local school districts decide what to report based on their understanding of what constitutes bullying.

A 2018 report released by WalletHub.com ranked Michigan ninth nationally for bullying, based on 2017 data.

State law defines bullying as follows:

“Bullying” means any written, verbal, or physical act, or any electronic communication, including, but not limited to, cyberbullying, that is intended or that a reasonable person would know is likely to harm 1 or more pupils either directly or indirectly by doing any of the following:

(i) Substantially interfering with educational opportunities, benefits, or programs of 1 or more pupils.

(ii) Adversely affecting the ability of a pupil to participate in or benefit from the school district’s or public school’s educational programs or activities by placing the pupil in reasonable fear of physical harm or by causing substantial emotional distress.

(iii) Having an actual and substantial detrimental effect on a pupil’s physical or mental health.

(iv) Causing substantial disruption in, or substantial interference with, the orderly operation of the school.

A twice-delayed mandate on commercial and institutional phone systems could soon require costly upgrades for hundreds of businesses across Michigan, according to a leading association of small employers. The mandate, intended to enhance 911 emergency calling capabilities, will proceed at the end of the year, absent intervention by the Legislature.

The National Federation of Independent Business is calling for the repeal of the mandate on facilities of 7,000 square feet or more with multiline telephone systems, a requirement it regards as onerous and unnecessary.

Charlie Owens, director of NFIB Michigan, said the rule imposes potentially significant costs on the owners of small businesses and others, in return for nebulous or dubious benefits to public safety.

Owens said state regulators, headed by the State 911 Committee and the Michigan Public Service Commission, have been extremely rigid in developing the rule, authorized by a 2007 statute and originally set to go into effect in 2011.

Especially aggravating, he said, was the decision to reduce the minimum size of affected facilities from 40,000 square feet to 7,000 square feet.

Responding to objections from business and institutional phone system operators, the Legislature initially delayed implementation to 2016, and then to Dec. 31, 2019.

The Archdiocese of Detroit, for instance, initially said compliance costs could run as high as $2 million for its facilities.

Owens said it is time to scrap the rule altogether, at least for small business.

“It simply will not accomplish the objective. Technology is moving more rapidly than (state regulators) can keep up,” Owens said. “Faced with the cost of swapping out an entire phone system, some business owners will just get rid of them and go to cell phones.”

The State 911 Committee, largely responsible for developing the regulation, opposes another extension or revocation, said committee administrator Harriet Rennie-Brown.

The mandate is intended to give 911 operators critical information about the specific location of an emergency that, until recently, was typically not available when a 911 call came in from a multiline phone system, she said. First responders reacting to an active shooter in a large office complex, for instance, might need to be able to precisely locate where trapped workers are calling from, Rennie-Brown said.

The earlier delays in implementation have provided business and institutional owners sufficient time to comply, the committee said in a 2017 letter to the Legislature in opposition to additional extensions.

NFIB’s Owens said the regulation remains incomprehensible and unworkable for many of the association’s 10,000 members in the state and should be shelved.