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When Franki Dennison discovers one of her second- or third-grade students at Southeast Portland’s Arleta School is treating another classmate unkindly, she doesn’t ignore the student’s bad behavior. Neither does her student teacher.

“We stop for any incident and deal with it,” she says.

Sometimes that means pulling a child aside and talking about his or her conduct. In more severe cases, it may mean sending the child to the principal’s office.

Now a new bill in the Oregon Legislature would require that public schools like Arleta go a step further, requiring them to report to state officials what groups of students are being targeted by bullies.

If approved, House Bill 2599 would force school districts to implement training programs for staff to help prevent harassment and bullying. As it’s written now, the legislation would also deem school districts “nonstandard” if they did not comply. The penalty for non-compliance: The threat of losing state school fund money.

The goal of the bill, called the Oregon Safe Schools Act by its supporters, is to institutionalize anti-bullying regulations across the state. The measure, introduced by the House Education Committee, would also make explicit that the new protections for young people include gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students, who do not always report incidents of bullying, according to advocates.

This is not the first Oregon law to deal with the problem of bullying. Most recently, the 2007 Legislature passed a new law that encouraged schools to get tough on “cyberbullying” by asking them to prohibit it.

One thing is clear with this latest proposal: No one can claim to be a proponent of bullying, nor can anyone say they are opposed to making schools safer for children. But it is less clear if a new statewide mandate for training and new reporting requirements in times of extreme budget woes will get the support it needs to pass.

And then there’s another niggling question: Will it work?

Support for the measure comes from the usual suspects: the Oregon Education Association, the statewide teachers union; the Oregon Safe Schools and Communities Coalition; and Basic Rights Oregon, the advocacy group for LBGT Oregonians.

Joyce Liljeholm, of the safe schools groups, says the new proposal will toughen existing rules that now only encourage school districts to address bullying.

“It is my experience there are a lot of well-meaning principals and superintendents who need stronger laws,” Liljeholm says.

Mehera Scheu, a community education coordinator for Portland’s Sexual Minority Youth Resource Center, also supports the proposal. She recently trained 21 people how to teach others to prevent bullying in schools because she’s optimistic the Legislature will approve the bill and believes area schools will seek help in implementing the law’s stronger anti-bullying policies.

“I’ve personally talked to youth who’ve said they’ve been bullied,” Scheu says. “Their schools are not safe environments.”

That view is backed by national gay rights groups.

According to a recent report from the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network based in New York City, three-fifths of recently surveyed LBGT students in middle and high schools felt unsafe at school because of their sexual orientation or gender identification. The same report also revealed nine out of 10 of the 6,209 surveyed students had been harassed at school in the previous year because of their sexual identity.

The network says state laws that specifically enumerate sexual minorities as a protected class in their anti-bullying measures are more successful when it comes to protecting those youth. But only 11 states and the District of Columbia have measures to protect sexual minorities from harassment and bullying, according to GLSEN.

Dennison, the teacher at Southeast Portland’s Arleta, says she supports the idea of making schools safer for kids. But she worries that a new system for reporting incidents of harassment and bullying could produce unintended consequences. She wonders, for example, whether low-income schools with numerous reports of student misconduct would be punished in some way. Though Basic Rights Oregon says that is not the purpose of the bill.

Dennison’s colleague, Lisa Newlyn, a sixth-grade teacher at Arleta, questions any move to add layers of paperwork to what teachers already do in schools.

“I think it’s well intended,” Newlyn says. “I would rather see a law that establishes curriculum, has financial resources to back its execution and doesn’t place added burden on teachers and principals.”