Same experience I had. Went from a medium sized middle school of ~3k to a high school of ~15k students and had the worst time. Transferred to a rural high schoo

Same experience I had. Went from a medium sized middle school of ~3k to a high school of ~15k students and had the worst time. Transferred to a rural high school of ~1500 and had a much better experience the rest of my high school years. The other contributing factor though is culture. My middle school was serving a metropolitan suburbia. Demographics were mostly white, a good amount of Hispanics, and few Asian / African kids. Parents were often overbearing and abusive through their helicoptering, Stark contrast with my high school - much more mixed culture, knock 30k off the mean income, tons more violently abused kids who take it out on their peers. And then I moved to a literal bleach show, where in 1500 kids there were probably ~50 - 100 non-white students, and it was in a college town where the median income was around 100k. The kids were super passive aggressive to an outsider like me, but there was absolutely no violent bullying, and the insularism of the community meant I could just ignore everyone and they ignored me. Fundamentally though, its systemically broken to stuff kids in grades like this, with the same peers, with no escape for over a decade. Bullying is barely a thing outside of school because its only in school that you cannot escape it. In the real world, you quit jobs with peer abuse, you move away from toxic neighbors, you avoid the bad neighborhoods. It isn't toughening them up because its in no way reflective of reality to have to put up with verbal and physical harassment every day without reasonable recourse.