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May 18th / 20th, 2007
"Teachers as Targets"
Wall to wall media coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre has finally
abated, but the tragedy (which included the murder of several teachers) has not
been forgotten. Virginia Governor Tim Kaine has appointed a special commission
to study what happened, and how it might have been prevented. An increasing
number of universities are examining quick responder text messaging
systems. And, colleges like UNC-G are now heeding the Blacksburg wake-up call by
moving swiftly to expel students at the first sign of trouble. Meanwhile, the
NRA and other groups continue to preach their credo that “guns don’t kill
people, people kill people. Technically they are correct. But if we only look
at guns as the cause of school violence, and shootings as the only kind of
school violence, then we are in major denial.
I remember talking with my friend Brenda Hampton, creator of the long
running family drama “7th Heaven” not long after the Columbine incident. Back
then, Senators Brownback and McCain were blaming school violence of all kinds on
television and motion pictures. Hampton commented that it is always easier
to “assign blame and then we all feel better about (solving) the problem.”
She recognized that mental illness was the root cause of violent student
behavior, not television or guns. Today, further investigations into Tech
assassin Seung Hui Cho’s background prove Hampton’s point, by revealing a
history of mental illness that had been left largely untreated since childhood.
Thanks to a flawed system of communication between mental health professionals,
educators, and law enforcement, Cho slipped through the cracks, and more
like him could follow. The good news is that shooting sprees are a rare
occurrence. The bad news is that not all violent youth inflict their damage with
guns.
Earlier this year, for example, a teacher in Philadelphia was attacked by
two of his students. The boys, ages seventeen and fifteen, used only their
fists. The teacher suffered multiple injuries including two broken vertebrae in
his neck. Meanwhile, a female teacher in Wisconsin was deliberately pushed
from the school stage by an angry six year old student. And, just last
week, a teacher at Southeast Guilford High School was brutally beaten by a
fifteen year old boy.
This kind of non gun related violence against teachers has been growing over
the past ten years. At the turn of the new millennium, Lou Harris and
Associates reported that students physically assault 190,000 teachers each year.
Closer to home, Guilford County reported sixty-three (63) assaults on
school personnel in 2005, and that number grew to seventy-one (71) assaults last
year.
Michael LaRocco, the injured teacher at Southeast High, told the Greensboro
News & Record that he has seen an increase in problems among students with
behavioral and emotional problems as the school system moved more of those
troubled youth into the general population. Said LaRocco, “I’ve been saying
for awhile that there are some kids in a school setting that should not be”.
In the past quarter century, more and more public schools began to focus on
alternative education and various programs of last resort for at-risk
students. These initiatives included privately run residential schools that were
designed to get troubled youth back on track and then reintegrated into the
public schools. But those specialized programs couldn’t reach or reform every
troubled kid, and now it is clear that society is failing to identify, weed
out, and re-route our most troubled children. Instead, as LaRocco noted, we
are continuing to mainstream kids with a history of violent behavior.
Many states such as Virginia have reformed the system of juvenile justice so
that certain youths can be tried as an adult, and that is a step in the
right direction. Personally I find it disturbing that each time a teenage thug
assaults a teacher, we in the media aren’t allowed to publish the name of the
criminal simply because of his age. In my view, if a kid is old enough to
commit a violent crime, he’s old enough to face the public and do hard time,
either in prison or in a youth correctional facility.
But perhaps if we become more attentive to the signs and symptoms of violent
behavior that children display early on, we won’t need to imprison them
later. Perhaps if we reform information sharing and coordinated psychiatric
evaluations we won’t be so quick to mainstream problem students. And, perhaps if
we increase the number of School Resource Officers, we won’t have so many
assaults on teachers.
Ironically, as the number of assaults against teachers is rising, the North
Carolina legislature is considering a statewide ban on corporal punishment.
Are the two connected? Can one prevent the other? Organizations like
Parents and Teachers Against School Violence say bottom beatings can be injurious
and accomplish nothing. But I spoke with a former principal the other day
who told me he once had to paddle a high school senior. The 200 pound boy
accepted the punishment in lieu of the alternative: indefinite expulsion. Today
that boy is a productive citizen and a good friend of the Principal who
paddled him.
While I am not necessarily a proponent of paddling, I do believe that
appropriate physical punishment can be an effective deterrent . Anyway, while we
are waiting on Commission reports, and while we strive to get a handle on
effective mental health treatments and campus security measures, we might do well
to hold off on the statewide school spanking ban. These days, mean kids
are not sparing the rod on teachers, so maybe the teachers should return the
favor.
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