After being bullied for months, a 13-year-old girl says she no longer feels safe at her Dartmouth school.
Montana Mattix says someone at school stole her phone. She eventually got it back, along with an anonymous letter threatening her.
“This stays between us and if you tell anyone you will be sorry,” it reads.
Mattix says the note came after months of name-calling and her mother feels all the bullying is to blame for a trip to the doctor.
“The doctor feels that she’s stressed and it could have been the result of an anxiety attack,” says Lesley Desboroough.
Desborough says her main concern is that officials at John Martin Junior High School didn’t inform her about the anonymous letter. She feels they should have called her to let her know what was going on.
The Halifax Regional School Board agrees.
“For some reason, it didn’t happen, so we apologize to the family,” says school board spokesperson Doug Hadley.
“Now we’re trying to determine what the process was and if we have to change some things, we will.”
This isn’t the first case of bullying to come out of John Martin Junior High School; 12-year-old Keith Watson recently complained of being bullied over his prosthetic eye.
Watson’s parents transferred him to another school and now Desborough is considering doing the same.
“She didn’t have an issue at John MacNeil when she went there. There was never a problem,” says Desborough.
“There was zero-tolerance for bullying and I believe that there is in this school too, but it’s not really shown when they’re not communicating with the parents.”
Mattix doesn’t want to leave her friends but she says she can’t concentrate on her schoolwork and feels scared after receiving the threatening letter.
“I feel unsafe, really unsafe to even turn the corner in school,” she says.
With files from CTV Atlantic's Kayla Hounsell
