Surprise! It's not OK to punch the teacher or threaten to blow up the school
- Joanne Jacobs
- May 19
- 2 min read
Attacking a teacher or threatening to bomb the school might get more than a "restorative" talk and a lollipop, Montgomery County (Maryland) schools have decided. "Bomb threats, for example, could lead to suspension or expulsion," reports Nicole Asbury in the Washington Post. "Previously, the district’s student code of conduct said such threats could trigger the lowest level of response or penalty, such as a detention or other teacher-led intervention."
Student misbehavior has gotten worse. "Since the return to in-person instruction, several teachers have reported being attacked by students," and the schools have been "repeatedly targeted by faux bomb threats," she writes. The county's public schools were closed from spring of 2020 to fall of 2021.
These "extremely low expectations" are being raised, says Peter Moran, the district’s chief of school support and improvement. Starting in the fall, students who attack a staffer at a middle or high school will face a “Level 4” to “Level 5” response, which could include suspension. That means administrators, not just teachers, will be involved.
However, the district will continue to use restorative justice, such as counseling, support from a social worker or a behavioral intervention plan, along with other disciplinary measures, Moran said.
Rules aren't applied uniformly across the school system’s more than 200 schools, administrators concede. According to a district report, black students are much more likely to be suspended, and white and Asian students are less likely to be suspended. (It's not clear what a student had to do to get suspended. Planting a real bomb? Murdering a teacher while affirming a belief that sex is binary?)
Putting enforcement responsibility on administrators, not teachers, might help with consistency, if it is indeed a problem. Raising expectations for student behavior -- and for school safety and order -- is an essential first step.
A parent in the district, Michael Petrilli thinks Montgomery County schools' reputation for excellence is not well earned. The "soft-on-discipline approach, with a big focus on restorative justice," is "clearly failing in some of the district’s toughest schools," he writes. Montgomery County "desperately needs to make a U-turn when it comes to its grading, discipline, and attendance policies."
"Despite committing a string of arrestable offenses on campus before the Florida school shooting, Nikolas Cruz was able to escape the attention of law enforcement, pass a background check and purchase the weapon he used to slaughter three staff members and 14 fellow students because of Obama administration efforts to make school discipline more lenient..."
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2018/02/28/obama_administration_school_discipline_policy_and_the_parkland_shooting.html
Black students are punished for fighting and attacking teachers, for bringing drugs and guns to school. Asians? IS there some epidemic of Asian violence that they've been keeping secret? Bah!
They know it's Black culture causing their problems. They just can't figure a way to counter it without admitting that the culture is the cause. So they call out for 'Equity', that is, punishing equal numbers of OTHER races that are NOT causing problems.
"Rules aren't applied uniformly across the school system’s more than 200 schools, administrators concede. According to a district report, black students are much more likely to be suspended, and white and Asian students are less likely to be suspended." The second sentence doesn't prove the assertion made in the first sentence. Perhaps the black students disproportionately commit offenses that merit suspension. The report doesn't help; all it does is list the number of offenses each group commits but does not even show the demographics of the schools. For all we know there's more black kids than white kids in the school. And anyone who thinks that it would be shocking for Asian kids to be less likely than either black OR white …
A student throws hands at me, I throw charges at him.
I am a retired teacher. Though I never was attacked, and never taught in a district where that was a problem, an attack by a teenager is a law-enforcement issue and should result in charges. One of the high schools my spouse taught in had problems with students fighting each other; a new principal put in place the policy of calling the police, after it was broken up, and the students facing charges. On-campus fighting stopped very quickly.