Last January, the Newtown High School wrestling team was forced to forfeit a South-West Conference match and  a quad meet with Enfield after several team members were caught trying to initiate a freshman by dunking his head into a toilet bowl. The team and the school played down the incident, and it became just a footnote to an otherwise successful season. The wrestlers at Trumbull High School weren’t so lucky. Their season ended in ignominy when eight students were arrested and seven were expelled following a hazing incident in which a student was jammed into a locker, slammed into a wall, and sodomized with a plastic knife handle. One report said a team member told police that athletic coaches at the school allegedly had seen the victim hog-tied and had done nothing.

It may be unfair to link the Trumbull and the Newtown hazing incidents, since the physical injury and emotional trauma inflicted by the wrestlers in Trumbull was much worse. But the two incidents are linked, along with similar sports hazing events this year at five other high schools around the country, in a report on sports hazing on ESPN.com, the national sports network’s Web site, and in the book High School Hazing by Hank Nuwer, an acknowledged authority on the subject of hazing. This isn’t exactly the kind of publicity the Newtown Chamber of Commerce or the Board of Realtors likes to see.

The publicity is certainly unfair and unrepresentative of the high school and the town as a whole, but we should be worried less about our image and more about the conditions that arise in the locker rooms, the hallways, the classrooms, or the playgrounds of our schools that lead students to believe that cruelty is acceptable, or worse, desirable. We want our children to be competitive, even aggressive, in realizing their goals. How quickly the aggressive pursuit of one’s dreams comes undone, however, when it is a mere masquerade for cruel aggression against the dreams of others. The difference between the two has to be taught both at home and in the classroom.

After months of discussion, the Board of Education is currently reviewing a draft policy on hazing that says “hazing activities of any type are inconsistent with the educational goals of the school district and are prohibited at all times.” The policy is explicit in its intolerance of hazing and specific in the types of cruel and demeaning behavior that will not be accepted under the guise of team or school spirit. When the school board finally does adopt the policy, it will not solve the problem, but it will lay the foundation for teaching one of the fundamental lessons of life: the greatest success stories start with respect and compassion for others.