Parents are supposed to be able to look on school-district Web sites and easily see how often bullying happens there.

A 2007 state law designed to protect children from bullying and harassment in schools requires districts to post numbers semiannually. But by and large, central Ohio school districts aren't.

Fewer than a third of central Ohio's 49 school districts currently say online how many students have reported that they have been bullied. Fewer than half of Franklin County's 16 districts do. All central Ohio districts have Web sites.

No one is monitoring whether districts comply with the law because the law didn't put anyone, including the Ohio Department of Education, in charge of doing so. Department spokesman Scott Blake said the department has never checked and doesn't take on tasks it isn't specifically given the authority to perform.

State Sen. Jimmy Stewart, an Athens County Republican who wrote the law while he served in the Ohio House, said he thought the department would oversee the districts' compliance. "I assumed (districts) would comply with the law as it was written. I had no idea they weren't."

When asked why the information wasn't available, some district officials said they didn't know about the law. Others said they had no bullying incidents, so they didn't post anything. A few acknowledged that the requirement had gone unnoticed but said they would immediately post the information in a place where parents could easily locate it.

"Shame on us," said Delaware schools spokeswoman Jennifer Ruhe. "Obviously, we take bullying very seriously. That one really did slip through the cracks for us. We are working on it, and will be getting it up as soon as possible."

Four school districts, all in Fairfield County, linked to the information from their home pages, making it easy to find. Others require Internet-savvy parents to scour their sites and read fine print if they want to find the bullying report.

Hilliard schools' data didn't include the word bullying, making it difficult to locate. The district said it will move the report to a more prominent place. Gahanna-Jefferson's information was a single line at the end of a district profile page.

Districts that do provide bullying data vary widely in how, and how often, they report it. Some report it by school or grade and some at the district level, but all are supposed to use a common state-provided definition.

Fairfield Union schools, for example, had four reports of bullying through January. Olentangy schools in Delaware County had 25 reports of bullying from August to December 2008, and Dublin schools reported 18 verified cases districtwide from January to June 2008.

It doesn't appear that Columbus schools or any districts in Madison County had posted bullying reports. Licking County districts, only one of which had posted a report, began adding information to their Web sites after a reporter called the districts.

Legislators "pass a lot of things sometimes and don't always tell us what they are," said Thomas Forman, superintendent of Heath schools in Licking County. He said he'd review the law.

Stewart said he isn't eager to introduce more legislation to fix the problem. He'd rather districts just comply with the law as it was written. The current law does not impose sanctions for districts that ignore the rules.

jsmithrichards@dispatch.com