One Student's Behavior

Tweet I was talking to another teacher this afternoon. She asked me if I had heard about the lock-down at one of the local high schools. I said I hadn't. She said that she didn't have all the details, but it seems one of the students had threatened to kill one of the office staff members. It's a long story, but the student was eventually sent to the alternative high school. The students in the regular high school, however, are still on lock-down because that is where the staff member works.

Of course that started me thinking about how unfair it is that one student can disrupt the education of an entire school. It means about 1200 other students have to suffer consequences because of one student's actions.

It's impossible to measure the detrimental effect something like this has on the education and learning of those other students. In this age of "No Child Left Behind," where every student is expected to meet proficiency levels, how can we expect each student to do their best when faced with these kinds of stressful situations.

I'm not sure what the solution is. Often, students who make threats like this are court-ordered to be in school. Sometimes they have IEPs that label them with a behavior disability. If this is the case, the student can't be expelled because his disability is behavior. The entire IEP would have to be rewritten and certain accommodations would have to be put in place.

I think that until the parents of the other 1200 students protest, not much will happen. Unfortunately, the preferred method of protest is to pull their children out of school in order to enroll them elsewhere or to homeschool them. Sadly, this still doesn't solve the problem for the other 1199.

The teacher who was telling me about the lock-down then asked me if I regretted retiring. You can probably tell what my answer was.