JumpinJesus

Here is an anecdotal example that will hopefully illustrate what is faced by many of us. There is a girl in my class who is classified as a special education student. She was labelled such due to emotional and behavior problems. She is a 13 year old 6th grader reading on a 2nd grade level. She and I have a good relationship now but it wasn't always that way.

Last year she and I had a bit of a run-in. My students were in the hallway and she walked out of her room in a huff and shoved two of my students out of the way. "Excuse me!" I said to her. "I don't care how mad you are at your teacher, you don't walk through my students like that and shove them. You owe them an apology."
Her response was, and I quote: "You don't know what the fuck you're talking about." I wrote up a referral and sent it to the vice principal. When I spoke to him, he told me, "There's nothing I can do. She's already been suspended 10 days this year and we can't suspend Special Ed students more than 10 days in a school year." He was right. State Law forbids it. The next day, she was in the hallway, "They didn't do shit to me," she bragged to a friend. I approached her again and said, "You know, you've got quite a foul mouth. Your mother lets you talk like that?"
"She don't care."
So I called the mother. The mother said, "I told her not to cuss at school."
The following day, she had another incident with yet another teacher. This time, she threatened to kill the teacher in question. Walking out of the teacher's room, she slammed the door hard enough that the window in the door shattered.

The teacher she threatened called the police and wanted to press charges since the school could do nothing in the area of consequences for this. The teacher said, "I won't press charges if you transfer the student out of this school." She was told that the girl's mother was claiming to be homeless so the girl couldn't be transferred. The only consequence we could come up with was to take her recess away. That very day, at recess, she told her teacher, "I'm going outside to play. Try and stop me." Guess what? We couldn't stop her, nor could we discipline her for disobeying because she had already been suspended for 10 days.

This is just one example of some of the problems we face on a daily basis in our school. The main reason for this is the lawsuits schools have faced over the years. In most school systems, the board will settle the suit rather than face the publicity, so policies over the years have been implemented to avoid any possible lawsuit.

2 weeks ago, a teacher broke up a fight in which a 5th grader was beating the living hell out of a 3rd grader in the hallway outside of a class. The teacher who broke up the fight is now being investigated for child abuse for grabbing the 5th grader and pulling her off the 3rd grader. She's under investigation because the 5th grader went home and told her mother the teacher threw her against the wall. The mother called DCFS and is now threatening to sue. The videotape from the hallway clearly shows that the teacher did not throw the student against the wall, but that has not stopped the investigation nor the threat of the lawsuit. We are now being told that if we witness a fight, we are to do nothing to stop it. We are only to call security and stand back. Yet, I can assure you that the next time a student is injured in a fight, we will be threatened with a lawsuit for not stopping it.

This is one of the major reasons why I argued in my earlier post to do away with Compulsory Attendance. One of the main reasons private schools and charter schools perform so much better than public schools on standardized tests is because they are able to pick and choose their students. If you are able to select which students attend your school, you are easily able to remove students who continually create an unsafe environment.

This isn't the only reason that public schools are in such poor shape, but it helps illustrate that yes, in most cases, our hands are tied.

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"I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am" - Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses