Questions for School on Bullying and a Suicide

But acrimony over what school officials knew and how they dealt with the bullying of Ms. Prince, 15, has intensified since Monday, when the district attorney announced that nine students who hounded her would face criminal charges. Six students were named and charged with felonies, and three faced charges as juveniles and were not identified.

School leaders said the district attorney had gotten it wrong when she said that teachers and officials had long known about the hazing of Ms. Prince, a newcomer from Ireland who was relentlessly taunted as an “Irish slut” by some students after she briefly dated a popular senior football star.

The district attorney, Elizabeth D. Scheibel, for her part, issued a terse statement on Thursday suggesting that the school superintendent did not know the facts. Lending support to the district attorney’s account, some students said in interviews that they had seen teachers witness bullying incidents or had seen a teacher console Ms. Prince as she wept. On the day she committed suicide in mid-January, she was seen crying in the nurse’s office, according to students.

As new details emerged about Ms. Prince’s persecution, school district leaders, in a flurry of television appearances and interviews, insisted that neither they nor the principal had known the extent of the hazing. They said that teachers were instructed to report all incidents and that the principal of South Hadley High School learned only at the time about two examples of harassment of Ms. Prince, both about a week before her suicide, and had disciplined the two girls involved immediately.

Officials did not realize that several other girls continued to harass Ms. Prince in the days that followed, according to Gus Sayer, the superintendent, and Edward J. Boisselle, the chairman of the school committee, as the school board is known here. And only after her death, they said, did officials learn that she had been threatened and slurred since October.

The officials said they had no record of Ms. Prince’s parents complaining to the school about the hazing, something that the district attorney and the parents say the mother did twice. They said they had taken districtwide measures to fight the problem of bullying well before Ms. Prince’s torment came to light.

“We were proactive, but unfortunately, accidents and tragedies can still occur,” Mr. Boisselle said in an interview.

Darby O’Brien, a friend of the Prince family, said Thursday that Ms. Prince’s parents had told him that they had twice tried to alert the school and protect their daughter. Anne Prince, the mother, told him that in one case she had contacted a school official in November asking “whether this gang of girls was a threat to her daughter,” and was told not to worry. The mother said she had contacted the school again in the first week of January as the taunting continued, Mr. O’Brien said.

The parents, who are discussing a possible civil suit, have refused to speak to reporters. Mr. O’Brien, a parent and head of an advertising agency here, called for the superintendent, board chairman and principal to resign. “I can’t buy the story that they were unaware,” he said. “They are running for cover.”

Some parents defend the district. Jana Darrow-Rioux, who has been involved with the antibullying efforts started at the school last year, says she believes that the school is being unfairly blamed.

“I think it’s convenient for people to want to punish the school because it’s the only tangible organization in this mess,” Ms. Darrow-Rioux said. She said that officials had not been able to share information during the investigations and that this had fueled unwarranted rumors.

In interviews, some students and parents described bullying incidents that they said were witnessed by teachers. A few times in December and early January, for example, Ms. Prince arrived at a class late and crying; a teacher tried to console her in the hallway and then left her there, said a student who did not want to be identified, citing the criminal proceedings.

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