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California teacher ‘talks down’ shooter

January 11, 2013 by

Thanks to a heroic teacher who “talked down” a 16-year-old with a shotgun, nobody was killed at a rural California high school yesterday.  One Taft High School student was critically wounded, but is now in stable condition. Wounded in the forehead by a shotgun pellet, science teacher Ryan Heber talked to the shooter, letting 28 students flee the room. With help from a campus supervisor, Kim Lee Fields, who’d heard the shots fired, he got the boy to surrender to police. RyanHeber_1357858333303.jpg

About half of California’s high schools, 16 percent of its middle schools, and 5 percent of its elementary schools have police or resource officers on campus, and 83 percent of the officers at high schools are armed, according  an EdSource survey, reports the Christian Science Monitor.

Taft High’s armed resource officer wasn’t at school because he was snowed in. However, police reportedly were at the school within 60 seconds of a 911 call from a neighbor, who saw the boy enter a side door with the shotgun.

The Kern County Sheriff’s office is investigating reports the suspect threatened students last year, reports the Los Angeles Times.

Angela Hayden, whose 16-year-old daughter attends Taft, said the suspected shooter allegedly threatened to kill her daughter and other students last year while they were on a school bus during a field trip to Universal Studios.

“He was telling everyone that he had a list of people who messed with him over the years and that he was going to kill them,” Hayden told The Times.  She said the boy allegedly said his brother would be the first victim.

Hayden said her daughter complained about the incident to a vice principal and that the boy was expelled for several days. After the boy returned, Hayden said, she called the principal wanting to know why he was not permanently barred from campus. The principal declined to discuss the punishment, citing privacy concerns, according to Hayden.

“Everybody knew about this kid,” Hayden said.

The shooter used his older brother’s shotgun, Sheriff Donny Youngblood said. He had extra ammunition in his pocket.

In response to the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the White House is now considering federal funding for schools that want to hire police officers and increase surveillance, California Sen. Barbara Boxer told NBC. The NRA, derided for proposing armed guards at schools, isn’t going to go along if it’s part of a bill also calling for a ban on high-capacity ammunition clips.

Filed Under: Bullying, Violence Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Safety first: Schools where kids can learn

January 10, 2013 by

Student learning requires a positive school climate and effective discipline policies, concludes Ed Week‘s Quality Counts 2013.

National initiatives to improve schools tend to focus heavily on curriculum, testing, and personnel. But a growing consensus also recognizes that the elements that make up school climate—including peer relationships, students’ sense of safety and security, and the disciplinary policies and practices they confront each day—play a crucial part in laying the groundwork for academic success.

I agree that a safe, orderly school environment is the first step to learning — though not the whole journey.

Ed Week looks at ”zero tolerance” discipline policies, now mercifully falling out of favor, and “promising alternative models that seek to reduce conflict and ensure schoolhouse safety without resorting to expulsion or out-of-school suspension.”

In the classroom arena, they document ways in which educators are working to bolster students’ ability to cope with academic and personal pressures that can interfere with learning and lead to peer conflict and bullying.

. . . Finally, this package examines factors often left out of the school climate discussion: the role of parents and community groups—and even of a school’s physical design and layout—in the learning environment.

In addition, there’s a survey of teachers’ and administrators’ views on school climate, safety and discipline. 

Filed Under: Bullying, Education, Safety, Zero Tolerance Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

In D.C., expulsion is rare — except at charters

January 7, 2013 by

Washington D.C.charter schools expel students at far higher rates than district-run schools, reports the Washington Post.

During the 2011-12 school year, when charters enrolled 41 percent of the city’s students, they removed 227 children for discipline violations and had an expulsion rate of 72 per 10,000 students; the District school system removed three and had an expulsion rate of less than 1 per 10,000 students.

While two-thirds of charters recorded no expulsions, a charter for drop-outs expelled 30 students — nearly a third of enrollment — and another expelled 5 percent of its students.

In her senior year, Elsie Mayo was forced out of Thurgood Marshall Academy, a high-performing charter school, for coming to school drunk, talking back to a teacher and pulling a false fire alarm. She finished the year at Anacostia High School and qualified for $70,000 in scholarships to attend Simmons College in Boston, where she’s studying math and computer science. Thurgood Marshall counselors told her how to get the scholarship aid, she says in the video (below).

The D.C. school system relies heavily on long-term suspensions and involuntary transfers. It also runs alternative middle and high schools for badly behaved students. There’s talk of creating an alternative school for charter students who can’t behave in class.

Scott Pearson, executive director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, hopes to reduce expulsions.

A few weeks after taking the charter board’s helm, Pearson released two years of discipline data. In August, the charter board published an additional year’s worth of numbers.

It already has had a “profound effect,” with charter expulsion rates dropping 25 to 30 percent so far this school year, Pearson said.

Schools are “taking a new look at their discipline procedures, and in many cases have modified their discipline procedures significantly to reduce the number of suspensions and expulsions,” he said.

However, Pearson doesn’t want charters to abandon expulsion for students who are dangerous or disruptive. Parents interviewed in the Post‘s video agree that safety is important.

Filed Under: Education, Safety Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Play TSA! It’s fun — and educational

January 3, 2013 by

For everyone who traveled over the holidays, here are reviews of the Playmobil Security Checkpoint.

I was a little disappointed when I first bought this item, because the functionality is limited. My 5 year old son pointed out that the passenger’s shoes cannot be removed. Then, we placed a deadly fingernail file underneath the passenger’s scarf, and neither the detector doorway nor the security wand picked it up. My son said “that’s the worst security ever!”. But it turned out to be okay, because when the passenger got on the Playmobil B757 and tried to hijack it, she was mobbed by a couple of other heroic passengers, who only sustained minor injuries in the scuffle, which were treated at the Playmobil Hospital. The best thing about this product is that it teaches kids about the realities of living in a high-surveillence society.

Another reviewer thinks “this toy would be a lot more realistic with about 350 people standing in line for an average of an hour.”

A third adds:

Thank you Playmobil for allowing me to teach my 5-year old the importance of recognizing what a failing bureaucracy in a ever growing fascist state looks like. . . . Just the other day he asked me why we had to forfeit so much of our liberties and personal freedoms and I had to answer “well, it’s because the terrorists have already won.”

It’s a real toy, though it’s been off the market for five years now.

Via Instapundit.

Filed Under: Safety Tagged With: , , , ,

Lawyer withdraws Newtown suit — for now

January 2, 2013 by

That $100 million lawsuit claiming Connecticut failed to protect Sandy Hook Elementary students has been withdrawn, but could be refiled.

“I received new evidence on security at the school, which I need to evaluate,” (lawyer Irving) Pinsky said Monday.

The suit was filed in the name of “Jill Doe,” a six-year-old girl who survived the massacre but allegedly was traumatized by hearing screams, cursing and gunshots on the intercom. Pinsky said the suit’s goal was to improve school safety, not to make money. Of course.

Filed Under: Children, Safety, Violence Tagged With: , , , ,

The Sandy Hook lawsuits begin

December 31, 2012 by

Twenty children and six adults were gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Now the parents of a 6-year-old survivor are suing the school for $100 million because their child heard “cursing, screaming, and shooting” over the school intercom. “As a consequence, the … child has sustained emotional and psychological trauma and injury, the nature and extent of which are yet to be determined,” the claim said.

Why should the school be held responsible? asks Jazz Shaw on Hot Air.

The lawsuit claims the children were not protected from “foreseeable harm” because officials had failed to provide a “safe school setting” or design “an effective student safety emergency response plan and protocol.”

Sandy Hook Elementary’s doors were locked, writes Doug Mataconis, a lawyer, on Outside the Beltway. Adam Lanza shot his way in.

. . . teachers and aides did everything they could to evacuate the building or get the children into areas where they’d be hidden and safe. One teacher lost her life protecting her children from Lanza’s murderous spree. What, exactly, is it that this family asserts the school could have reasonably done differently? Perhaps they need to count their blessings, be glad their child is safe, and stop looking for a pot of gold out of this horrible tragedy.

I agree. Sandy Hook had a reasonable level of security for an elementary school — everything but armed guards. We can’t foresee and prevent every possible horror.

Here are the names of Adam Lanza’s victims.

Filed Under: Safety, Violence Tagged With: , , , , , ,

After Sandy Hook, what can we do?

December 21, 2012 by

There’s little we can do to prevent another school massacre, writes Megan McArdle. Confiscating 300 million semi-automatic weapons now in private hands is unconstitutional and politically impossible. So is locking up mentally ill people who haven’t hurt anyone and probably never will. So is banning the media from naming killers.

My guess is that we’re going to get a law anyway, and my hope is that it will consist of small measures that might have some tiny actual effect, like restrictions on magazine capacity.  I’d also like us to encourage people to gang rush shooters, rather than following their instincts to hide; if we drilled it into young people that the correct thing to do is for everyone to instantly run at the guy with the gun, these sorts of mass shootings would be less deadly, because even a guy with a very powerful weapon can be brought down by 8-12 unarmed bodies piling on him at once.

But I doubt we’re going to tell people to gang rush mass shooters, because that would involve admitting that there is no mental health service or “reasonable gun control” which is going to prevent all of these attacks.  Which is to say, admitting that we have no box big enough to completely contain evil.

The odds that any school will be attacked are very, very small. The money elementary schools spend on armed guards or police officers is money that can’t be spent on a reading specialist to get struggling students on track, a music teacher to motivate kids, a counselor to work with kids years before they became angry loners, etc.

At the elementary school where I tutor, one of the first grade teachers had locked her door on Wednesday. I knocked and a kid let me in to pick up my tutee. My other first grader ran up to me as I was leaving, smiled and “shot” me three times with his finger. He smiled again and ran off to join the recess crowd. I have no idea what that meant. Probably nothing. Earlier, he’d pretended he was an airplane as we walked along. He’s a little boy.

The lesson of Sandy Hook for education reformers is to honor the heroism of teachers and administrators and “tone down any rhetoric that implies that a typical teacher isn’t committed to doing right by her or his students,” writes Mike Petrilli, the father of two young boys.

That’s not to say we should relax our efforts to identify and remove ineffective teachers from the classroom; just as there’s the occasional bad cop, there’s the occasional bad teacher. Like the police force, the teaching force is much stronger without them. But neither should we ignore indications from the field that many teachers, including great teachers, have been feeling unappreciated, villainized, and blamed.

“Let us commit to bringing America’s heroic teachers and school leaders along with us on the path to reform, not to view them as the targets of reform—or of our scorn.”

Filed Under: Education, Health, Safety, Violence Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Recess returns — with less free play

September 6, 2012 by

Chicago schoolkids are going out for recess this week for the first time in 30 years — the mayor added time to the very short school day — and principals are worried that children don’t know how to play, reports the Chicago Tribune.

When Chicago’s Bright Elementary School added 15 minutes of recess to its school day this year, teachers ventured outdoors to find a run-down schoolyard with no playground, a sometimes violent neighborhood and a generation of kids who didn’t know how to play outside.

At Namaste Charter School, officials this year spent $23,000 for a “recess coach,” a modern-day schoolyard referee tasked with keeping fights and bullying to a minimum while also teaching games that could be unfamiliar to today’s schoolchildren — games like four square, tag and dodgeball.

Recess helps children learn, writes Nicholas Day in Slate.

Repeated studies have shown that when recess is delayed, children pay less and less attention. They are more focused on days when they have recess. A major study in Pediatrics found that children with more than 15 minutes of recess a day were far better behaved in class than children who had shorter recess breaks or none at all.

They’ll get more out of class, too: Children seem to learn more efficiently when information is spaced out—when it is distributed over time. It’s been widely documented that the brain needs a break. High-performing East Asian schools have famously long school days—but much of the extra time is taken up by recess, not instruction.

But principals see recess as a time of chaos. So the new recess is “more structured and sports-focused, less dreamy and aimless.”

The nonprofit organization Playworks puts full-time “recess coaches” in low-income schools—currently they’re in 387 schools in 23 cities—who teach children how to play: They organize games; they model how to resolve disputes (rock-paper-scissors); they try to get kids more active and engaged.

Playworks claims to add only the structure that might be provided by a big brother or sister teaching the little kids how to set up a game. There’s little fighting or bullying, the group says. But will the little kids grow up to run their own games?

Recess is a “no-brainer,” says Anthony Pellegrini, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Minnesota. But it’s value is undercut when the kids aren’t in charge.

 “A very important part of what kids do on the playground is social competence—that is, they learn how to get along with others,” he says. “You have to cooperate, you have to use language, you have to compromise. And that’s not trivial. That is huge, in terms of both academic success and success in life.”

Low-income children are the most likely to live in places where it’s not safe to play outside. They’re also the least likely to have time for play at school. “The more minority students a school has, and the lower the income level of their parents, the less time allotted for recess—nearly half of poor children go all day without it,” writes Day.

Filed Under: Bullying, Children, Education Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Making classroom rules

August 19, 2012 by

Who Makes the Rules in a Classroom? asks Nancy Flanagan on Teacher in a Strange Land. According to the latest dogma,  good teachers get students to collectively write their own classroom rules.

It seems democratic and encourages “buy-in,” teachers believe, even if students are just as likely to break their own rules as ones set by teachers.

When Flanagan tried it in her own music classroom, students came up with a list of “don’ts” — as in don’t empty your spit valve on someone else’s chair — but “it never felt as if we were wrestling with the really important issues: Building a functioning community. Safety. Personal dignity. Kindness. Order. Academic integrity. Democracy.”

She offers ideas about creating classroom rules, such as:

 •You’re shooting for influence, not control. Fact is, teachers never have absolute control over kids, even using techniques like fear, punishment, isolation and intimidation. (In edu-speak, “consequences.”) You want kids to behave appropriately because they understand that there are rewards for everyone in a civil classroom.

•No matter what rules you put on paper, your most important job is role-modeling those practices, not enforcing them. Behave the way you want kids to behave: Ignore minor, brainless bids for attention. Make eye contact with speakers. Don’t be an attention hog–your stories aren’t more important than theirs. Don’t be rude to kids. Apologize publicly when you’re wrong. Remember that you’re the adult in the room. It’s your calm presence that institutes order, not rules.

Don’t restate the obvious or load up on “don’ts,” she advises. But do give clear instructions when needed.  ”Stress: order facilitates learning, makes the class a pleasant place to be.”

 •Integrity helps build community. The most important directives in democratic classrooms are around ethical practices: A clear definition of cheating, understood by all students, in the digital age. Why trust and personal best are more important than winning. Why substandard work isn’t ever OK. How true leadership–kids want to be leaders, too– is a function of respect.

“Carrots and sticks” can be counter-productive, Flanagan writes. Students’ good behavior is its own reward: They get to attend a “civil, well-managed” school.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

College expels Trayvon Martin shooter

March 26, 2012 by

George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch member who killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, has been expelled from community college. College officials say Zimmerman’s presence on campus would endanger students — and him. Zimmerman has been in hiding since the case hit the media.

Filed Under: College, Safety Tagged With: , ,
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