Image from Texas Education Agency website
Texas teachers serve in a violent and dangerous “war zone,” state senators were told Tuesday morning.
“Let me provide some real-life examples. A young student throws a pair of scissors at a teacher. A student tells a pregnant teacher that he wants to kill her baby. A student uses profanity loudly. … None of those students had a diagnosed disability,” testified Kaylan Dixon-Smith, former teacher now an attorney with the Texas Classroom Teachers Association.
“In my kindergarten class, I had a student who frequently threw chairs and overturned desks,” she told a senate committee.
Lubbock’s senator Charles Perry – who used the term “war zone” during his comments – introduced four bills to toughen school discipline and give teachers more rights and expects them to end up on the governor’s desk.
There were objections – one senator said he doesn’t want to create a pipeline from the classroom to jail and some school administrators who support the bills want local flexibility in how they handle these problems.
Perry told LubbockLights.com he’s willing to make adjustments as long as they don’t water down the bills.
Besides Dixon-Smith, others illustrated the problem to the committee.
“We had a first grader bloody an assistant principal’s nose,” said Kirby Basham, superintendent of Grandview ISD.
“We’ve basically gone from zero tolerance to zero consequences. We need to have a reasonable balance,” Basham said.
Wylie ISD superintendent David Vinson, who used to be an assistant superintendent with Frenship, said, “In a classroom this last couple of months, I walked in and the principal was dealing with a bloody nose and she was developing two black eyes – and did become black. And she was in that classroom trying to restrain a student who needed help.”
“And children 7-years-old see that. … I go home worried about it at night,” Vinson said.
In another case, a student slammed a teacher’s head into a door leaving the teacher unable to speak for two years because of it, Vinson said.
Senator Charles Perry of Lubbock told LubbockLights.com he knew of a teacher who lost her eye in Corsicana.
“[San Angelo] ISD produced a report of 174 classroom assaults … on the campus over a three-year period and 72 of those required medical attention. Unfortunately, they’re not the outliers. That is something that’s systemic around the state,” Perry said.
As for the cause, Perry said times changed. Families used to be different.
“That’s one of the significant differences – kids don’t have that family environment. Kids are anti-social today for lots of reasons; social media and phones and those kind of variables. Our kid today is different than the kid was 20 years ago,” Perry said.
“I had a few boards across my backside. … We were clowning around and doing stupid stuff, but it was a different flavor of disruptive back then. It was more attention seeking,” Perry said.
Perry introduced four senate bills
- SB 1871: Allows a teacher to remove students for being abusive or disruptive. It also prohibits a school from returning a violent student back to a teacher’s classroom without the teacher’s consent. There are exceptions. The bill also requires schools to offer TCHATT – a telehealth program at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center for mental health services. The state already pays for it.
- SB 1872: Requires expulsion for students who engaged in aggravated assault, sexual assault, arson, murder, aggravated robbery, unlawful carrying of a weapon and other violent offenses. It applies both on and off school property
- SB 1873: Takes away a three-day limit for in-school suspensions. However, out-of-school suspensions would still have a three-day limit.
- SB 1874: Whistleblower protection for teachers. “A teacher may not be subject to disciplinary proceedings …” for reporting violent students to school administrators.
Objections raised
When Perry presented his bills in front of the Senate Committee on Education K-16, Democratic Senator Royce West of Dallas raised an objection.
“What is the test? Who determines? … What evidence do you use in order to make the determination?” West asked Perry.
Perry answered, “Innocent ’til proven guilty. I appreciate your due process piece of that. But at a minimum they should be in a different environment than the public-school classrooms.”
Putting a kid in alternative education is not the same as convicting the kid of a crime, Perry said, adding the standard should be reasonable suspicion.
Reasonable suspicions, according to the Texas Municipal Police Association, are some minimal level of objective justification. For example, it’s enough for a police officer to pull someone over.
West is a lawyer by profession and pressed further, asking, “If Johnny is accused of a crime and has said, ‘Hey, listen, I didn’t do it.’ And there is no history of violent behavior, how do we handle it?”
Perry answered, “That child would not be a threat to the classroom in that situation.”
“We’ll probably tweak the bill,” Perry told LubbockLights.com afterward. “I hope that there are things that we can do to put some of his concerns at ease.”
West encouraged voters and school systems from his district to reach out to Perry’s office – a move Perry welcomes.
Supporters of the bills had concerns, like San Angelo ISD superintendent, Christopher Moran.
Moran would prefer allowing discipline to be “… tailored to local community expectations.”
He thinks being disruptive is not enough for removal. It needs to be a student who repeatedly causes a problem, in his opinion.
“I strongly believe students should be removed if needed, but only after the implementation of appropriate classroom management,” Moran said.
Basham – who supports most of the reforms – agreed, saying, “Local ISDs need to have flexibility to make disciplinary decisions that reflect the values and expectations of their community.”
He’d prefer more flexibility but agreed violent kids need to be removed from class.
Senator Jose Menendez, D-San Antonio, said, “There’s no simple easy answer to the problem that you’ve presented today. And so, while we want a safe classroom, we also want to make sure we don’t create a pipeline from school to jail. We want to make sure that we get everyone educated.”
Perry told LubbockLights.com, “My bill allows for video instruction – and so if a kid can’t be in the physical classroom with physical kids and people that don’t feel safe, or that’s disruptive – we can create a secondary location.”
Perry was clear with LubbockLights.com he’s willing to touch up the bills but had no intention of leaving violent kids in classrooms.
Support and chances of passing
On paper the bills do not cost money, Perry said. He acknowledged there might be some additional cost of moving violent or disruptive students to alternative education.
“I would be shocked if the four bills don’t get to the Senate floor. I can’t tell you exactly how the House is going to manage it. There will be changes along the way,” Perry said.
He thought with “good certainty” some sort of discipline reform will reach the governor’s desk.
Senator Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe said, “Safety is the number one concern by the teachers. … And this is also keeping other kids safe.”
Vinson cited a survey, and said, “44 percent of our teachers had to evacuate their classrooms as a result of children misbehaving. You know that 82 percent of teachers reported they had one or more students verbally aggressive to them in class.”
“We love our babies and want to take care of them, but we’re not equipped in that way. … At the end of the day, they [teachers] are getting injured, and we just can’t have that,” Vinson said.
Dixon-Smith said, “If you want to keep teachers teaching, you must make the classroom safer.”
Perry said, “Unfortunately, we’ve placed our teachers in so many multiple hats and roles. They’re expected to be a teacher. They’re expected to be a surrogate parent. They’re expected to be a mental-health expert. And then … they’re expected to know how to take down a disruptive kid in their classroom physically. I have a principal. She weighs probably 105 pounds soaking wet. And she was telling me the other day that she was having to have training on how to take down an out-of-control child.”
Update and clarification: The original version of this story quoted Senator Perry as saying a particular district reported classroom assaults. Perry’s office later provided a clarification on the name of the ISD. The story was updated.
Please click here to support Lubbock Lights.
Comment, react or share on our Facebook post.
Facebook