Students feel safer in school, according to a Indicators of School Crime and Safety 2017, an annual federal report that analyzed 2015-16 data. Rates of student victimization are down.
Schools have beefed up security in the last 20 years, writes Evie Blad in Ed Week. More schools have armed guards or police officers on campus, the report noted. Ninety-five percent of schools reported holding lockdown drills with students.
However, teachers are less safe in school, reports Mark Keierleber on The 74. “During the 2015-16 school year, 6 percent of public school teachers said they were attacked by a student from their school, and 10 percent said a student had threatened them with injury. In all other survey years except 2011-12, about 4 percent of teachers reported being physically attacked.”
Source: National Center for Education Statistics
Forty-three percent of teachers reported that student misbehavior interfered with their ability to teach, an increase over previous years.
A year with Tony, a second grader with “anger impulsive disorder,” nearly killed La’Tia Taylor’s love of teaching, she writes in Education Post.
One day, angry that he couldn’t be first in line, Tony “began to yell at the other kids and push them.” Taylor intervened. “He choked me with my necklace, screaming at the top of his lungs,” she writes. “He pulled hard and the necklace left markings around my neck.”
Illinois has limited the use of suspension and expulsions in favor of “behavioral interventions,” she writes, but her Chicago school “did not provide training on developmentally-appropriate disciplinary methods that would help to serve students like Tony and to help guide and support teachers.”