@CTTC: Of course I got involved. My kid was in private school, though, so the channels of action were necessarily different.
And in that instance, my husband did not want punishment, but counseling for the kids, a re-direction. The school took a different tack and lay down the law, removing access to extracurriculars, placing warnings with the understanding that club titles and such would be stripped if things did not straighten up quickly.
After speaking with my husband, himself a former educator, and hearing his pleas for a way to understand why the kids thought my son needed to be SuperBlack and not just WaitingKid, I began to think there could be something more to the bullying, to the taunts.
I like the two-prong approach: warning and then the implementation of a penalty phase.