If you or a loved one are experiencing thoughts of suicide, call 988, Oklahoma’s mental health lifeline.

Eli was a vibrant 12-year-old who liked video games, sports and playing guitar for his family. 

His mother Kalah Ballance describes Eli as kind and thoughtful.

“Eli wasn’t the best sports player, but he was always the one that if you scored a goal, if you got a touchdown, he was the loudest,” she said. “He was the one that was up first cheering for you. It was almost like he scored that goal or he got that winning hit. He was that excited for that person.” 

Ballance said Eli sometimes had trouble communicating his feelings with his parents, and had some disciplinary issues at Twin Hills Public School, a small, rural school with about 350 students in Okmulgee. He had a small friend group but still had problems fitting in. 

Students would call Eli an antigay slur, say he was ugly and worthless, and tell him to kill himself. Ballance said Eli reported the incidents to school administrators at first but stopped after feeling like they didn’t take him seriously. 

Ballance said the district policy on providing written reports was unclear to her, but she  continued to verbally report the incidents. She estimates she contacted the school 10 times during the first part of Eli’s 7th-grade year.  

In one of those incidents, Eli got into a fight with another student on a school bus that ended in the other student breaking Eli’s hand. Ballance said administrators told her that the other student was suspended for three days. 

Eli died by suicide a few weeks before Christmas in 2023. Ballance believes that the bullying played a factor in his death. 

“There’s no accountability,” she said. “There’s no right or wrong, really. It’s like they have stricter policies for cell phones then they do bullying.” 

Ballance says school administrators failed to document and investigate her reports of bullying appropriately. 

She’s been trying to find a lawyer who will help her file a negligence lawsuit against the Twin Hills district. But lawyers she’s talked to in the past don’t think she has a viable case because of the legal protections that school districts and other governmental entities have under state law. 

Oklahoma enacted the School Safety and Bullying Prevention Act in 2013 to encourage schools to adopt better policies to protect students. The law includes a provision that its author said was intended to provide schools with legal protection against parents who try to sue. Districts in other states have agreed to multi-million dollar settlements over students who died by suicide after they experienced bullying. 

The law also gives Oklahoma schools requirements for developing anti-bullying policies, but its author said the legislation hasn’t had the impact she’d hoped. 

“I’ll admit, I don’t think this is working,” former Rep. Lee Denney, R-Stillwater, said. “I’ll admit that up front because kids are still bullied and kids are still killing themselves.” 

The Twin Hills student handbook for last school year mentions that the district has adopted the state bullying prevention law and provides a definition for bullying. But it didn’t include the full bullying policy that superintendent Gary McElroy provided to The Frontier in April, or say that the policy could be found online.  

The school updated its 2024-2025 student handbook in October to include the full policy and a form to report bullying after The Frontier asked about it. McElroy didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment from The Frontier by phone and email. 

The policy says incidents should “immediately be reported to the building principal” and “as much detailed information as possible” should be provided “in written form” to allow for an investigation.

Ballance said she verbally reported incidents to the principal, school counselor and superintendent, but none of them offered her a reporting form or referred her to a form online.

The State Department of Education is required to ensure school district bullying policies comply with state law. The agency can consider whether a school district is in compliance with the anti-bullying law during the accreditation process. The agency has only given one school district a deficiency in the past five years, records show. 

It can be difficult for families to sue over bullying

The state anti-bullying law includes a sentence that says the legislation doesn’t “impose a specific liability” on any school district. Its author said the clause was requested by Republican lawmakers and school lobbyists. 

One district in western Oklahoma argued in court that the clause protected them from legal responsibility for allegedly failing to adequately respond to bullying. 

But the state Court of Civil Appeals ruled in 2021 that while school districts do have some protection from lawsuits as governmental entities, the anti-bullying law doesn’t protect districts  from negligence claims. 

Oklahoma City attorney Brett Stingley represented a former Taloga Public Schools student and her family in the school bullying lawsuit, which was filed in 2015. The former student, who was only identified by the initials “J.W.” in court records, claimed that several Taloga students bullied her starting in her 4th-grade year.

The students started calling her a “whore” and “slut” during her 8th-grade year after learning that she was taking birth control pills, the lawsuit claimed. 

The school principal allegedly instructed a teacher to separate the former student from her bullies on a Future Farmers of America school trip in November 2014. But the former student alleged that the principal didn’t follow through to make sure teachers followed those instructions, and the harassment continued.

The bullies allegedly started a rumor that the girl had sex with another student on the trip. 

The girl claimed she notified the principal and other school officials several times that she was being harassed, but the principal didn’t believe her or offer her a complaint form to report the bullying. 

The former student claimed she stopped participating in extracurricular activities, began engaging in self-harm and her grades dropped. Her grades and mental health improved only after she transferred to another school halfway through her 8th-grade year. 

Taloga Public Schools superintendent Rob Royalty told The Frontier that the district takes all bullying reports seriously. He said he and other administrators were unfamiliar with the lawsuit.  

Darci Stephenson, who was the superintendent when the case was filed, didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment by The Frontier. 

The former student voluntarily dismissed the case earlier this year because she was no longer interested in continuing the almost decade-long legal battle, Stingley said. 

But families looking to sue school districts for negligence in the future can use the appellate court’s ruling to bolster their bullying cases, he said.

“I was really happy about that decision because this case is kind of unique,” Stingley said. “They weren’t really looking for a bunch of money or anything because my client, she transferred schools. It wasn’t an ongoing situation. But they liked how the district had to answer.” 

It’s difficult to say whether bullying-related lawsuits have become more common in recent years, Andy Fugitt, a lawyer who represents public school districts for the The Center for Education Law, said in an email. He thinks more parents have become familiar with the state’s bullying prevention law over time, and some feel the need for legal recourse. 

But cases against school districts are challenging and often don’t prove worthwhile for lawyers. The state law on legal claims against governmental entities sets a cap for non-property related damages at $125,000 for a single act. That amount is whittled away by attorney costs and other fees. 

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Policies like anti-bullying guidelines don’t have the force of law and don’t create a legal duty on their own, said Tulsa attorney Bo Rainey, who has represented Oklahoma public school districts over the past 23 years.

As a lawyer who represents families suing schools, Preston Bennett said he builds a case by trying to find where a school’s bullying response fell short. It’s important to determine when a student reported an incident and what teachers and administrators did once they found out. 

Schools try to limit their responsibility by bringing up outside factors in court, like a student’s home life or a teacher acting outside their official capacity as a school employee. 

“It gets very, very factually intensive, which is why those lawsuits can take a long time,” Bennett said. 

Lawmakers struggle to pass effective anti-bullying laws

State legislators, public school officials and parents of victims gathered for an interim study at the Oklahoma Capitol in September to discuss modernizing the School Safety and Bullying Prevention Act. 

Rep. Daniel Pae, R-Lawton, Rep. Jacob Rosecrants, D-Norman, and Rep. Brian Hill, R-Mustang, organized the study to strategize on bullying legislation after several measures introduced in recent years didn’t pass. 

Gov. Kevin Stitt vetoed a bill in 2021 that would have broadened the definition of bullying and required school administrators to notify the parents of victims and perpetrators within 24 hours of receiving a complaint. Schools also would have been required to notify parents immediately if a student expressed thoughts of suicide or encouraged another student to commit suicide.

Stitt wrote in a veto message that the bill would have created a “considerable” potential for unintended consequences because of its broad definition of bullying. Students could receive heavy punishments for relatively minor incidents, he said. 

Sen. Paul Rosino, R-Oklahoma City, introduced a bill last legislative session that would have made it a crime to threaten or harass another person on an online platform. 

The bill also included harsher penalties for aiding in suicide, though those parts were later cut. Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond supported the legislation, but it wasn’t heard on the House floor. 

“I know it’s another difficult issue, but you lose kids if you don’t get it right,” said former Speaker of the Oklahoma House of Representatives Steve Lewis, who spoke at the study. “And I’m not sure we’ve got it right yet in the state. You not only lose them to suicide, but you lose them to just not being successful in school and not being successful in life then after that, because they couldn’t get the attention of somebody that they needed to get the attention of.” 

Ballance also hopes bullying reform will be part of her son Eli’s legacy. She said she sent potential legislation to dozens of state legislators but received few responses. 

A draft of her bill includes a requirement that administrators provide families with a reporting form in multiple places, including on the district website. It would also require school employees to investigate each bullying report within three business days, and take action based on the findings within five days. 

“My hope is that another family doesn’t have to go through this,” Ballance said. “I shouldn’t have to — in the middle of my mourning —  I shouldn’t have to be fighting a school to be held accountable for their wrongdoings. I should be focused on healing, my family healing.”