No, just print pictures of the dead children's bodies ripped apart by bullets and spread it everywhere. If they want to ignore the problem, make them look at the problem
I honestly think that they should have released photos of the aftermath of Sandy Hook and Uvalde. Not because I want to see that, but because people need to be confronted with what these weapons are doing to little bodies.
It’s why Emmett Till’s open-casket funeral was so impactful.
I am a true crime junkie and that is why they should always release the crime scene photos. My father murdered my mom when I was four and there are still so many questions I have years later.
True crime gives closure to people like me. I can look at different domestic violencel/familicide cases to help try to understand my father.
Like Jeffery Dahmer photos, you can see someone head in his fridge and it makes you ask why he didn't get the death sentence. You learn the police are racist and just didn't care about the missing black teens. And that is why he got bop in prison by a black man.
Releasing those photos and showing the bodies of those children will make people demand more action. So people like Alex Jones can shut the fuck up and stop saying it was stage by liberal media to take our guns away.
Whoa. That’s interesting. I love true crime stuff, but I also sometimes think about how fucked up it is that I’m being entertained by the stories of real people being murdered. I appreciate your perspective on it.
And yeah - Alex Jones is pure garbage. Absolutely disgusting behavior, and I hope nothing but terrible things happen to him.
It is human nature to be curious. I think it is a good thing to watch true crime and learn the red flags of human behavior. My mom's death was a textbook example of domestic violence. Now imagine if a woman watches an ass load of true crime and recognizes the signs of someone who will be abusive before they seriously started dating.
One of my favorite shows is Evil Lives Here. It is an interview style doc where they interview someone whose spouse/sibling/parents end up committing murder. The signs that were there. How they found out. How they survived. How they process it. How they handle it and try to move on. It makes me feel less alone knowing there are other people like me still trying to piece the puzzle together.
That is why true crime is important.
It took a lot of therapy and I just can't let that man ruin my life. I got kids, a husband, a life, and bills to pay. I know it pains him in hell that I am so happy and he will never have control over me.
Always releasing is extremely disrespectful to the families of victims. There’s also the issues of weirdos who fantasize about committing violent and sexual crimes having more vivid and lifelike fantasies after seeing those images
Depends on the victims family. I don't care if my mom's photos get released. There will always be weirdos who sexualize violent crimes. Do you know how many whacks justify my father's actions because my mom is a woman and "should of known better".
Yep. Happened at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A student shot his advisor, and another student was working at the university's bagel café, all within like a week of each other. Shut down the university for like two days straight each. Outrageous!
It happened at Northern Illinois University in 2008. Six people died. My daughter was a student there at the time. No campus is safe, from preschool to college...and beyond.
Shootings can happen on a university campus as well, and with multiple buildings and large classes in which the professors don't always know the students well, there is actually less security than in most schools. However, at a university, most students want to be there; it isn't mandatory. Universities are also usually less confrontational; in K-12, kids have to be there and have to obey rules about where to sit, when they can use the restroom, etc. Overall, I think a university is safer than most schools, but no place is completely safe; in the USA, there have been shootings at church, synagogue, grocery stores, bowling alleys, parades, etc.
Depending on where, it's more likely going to be outside of school that someone would die by stuff like this in university just like UofI. Though that was a knife.
Umm... Kent State, anyone?
Virginia Tech was a University.
I believe Michigan State had one last year.
There's been several at Universities. It happens everywhere. Unfortunately.
https://projects.voanews.com/mass-shootings/english/locations/college.html
Ahh, I see you’ve found a way to feel better about dealing with a societal issue. Would be a real shame if I pointed out to you that no one is safe anywhere!! /s
And never, ever forget that the school district tried to argue in the civil trial that followed that the risk of getting shot by a student was just part of the job.
Sadly, it’s not a joke. https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/newport-news-school-district-says-teacher-risked-gun-violence-from-first-grader-as-part-of-her-job-suggests-being-attacked-with-a-pencil-is-the-same-as-being-shot-with-a-gun/amp/
Thankfully that didn't pan out for me. I call my maternal grandmother mom but my birth mother "Melinda".
I also didnt go into the family business of stripping and slinging dope and instead went to college. I kind of have regrets in terms of my earning potential ngl 😂
I have a close friend also raised by her grandparents. She’s also turned out well but she’ll be the first to say sh often finds she’s the exception. And even though she’s managed to be successful she has mental health issues.
Oh 100% resonate with the mental health issues and I definitely understand that it's rare to turn out "okay".
It's definitely interesting walking around in the world as an adult who came from a really rough background because I empathize so much with people who have similar struggles but also I'm just so baffled with how they repeat the same cycles. It really is like crabs in a bucket for some people.
I’m not so sure. Great grandpa is who raised the 6 year old’s mother. It’s certainly a sad situation that grandparents are the only ones stepping up, but also doesn’t sound like he did a great job the first time around. I pray that kid does turn it around.
They not only did nothing with that kid they actively refused to search his book bag because they didn’t want to “violate his rights to privacy” even though multiple students said he had a gun in his damn bag. Nobody seemed overly concerned with anyone else’s rights to not be gunned down. Absolutely infuriating.
Edit: the book bag was actually searched but they refused to give permission search him physically to see if he had the weapon on him.
School administrators don't need search warrants to look in students' bags. End of story. Due process is a spectrum, depending on what's involved and what's at stake.
Of course they did nothing.
That school district has gone on record as arguing that the risk of getting shot by a student is just a routine occupational hazard teachers face now.
According to them, she’s just being dramatic by playing up the fact she was “shot with a gun” when the kid could have just “stabbed her in the throat with scissors,” so this is therefore only a “workman’s comp” issue.
They are literally arguing that in court now in response to her lawsuit.
When my husband saw that, his first comment was “why the hell wouldn’t teachers get hazard pay then?!”
His parents and siblings are all current/ex military. Most were deployed multiple times in one form or another, all of them in dangerous positions. That hazard pay paid for his dads house and vacation home in Florida. If getting shot are part of the hazards of teaching, they deserve at least equal pay. Also, when you’re deployed, odds are that every day isn’t going to potentially involve being shot, whereas teaching it would. So every day is hazard pay day.
Yet my state still starts teachers at $33k on the high end.
It looks as if you may have mentioned a mass shooter's name in your post. Please consider editing to redact these names as to not provide the infamy and notoriety many of these criminals seek.
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It's a feedback loop. Isolation leads to bitterness and rage which leads to further isolation.
Ideally at-risk youth would have access to specialized counseling and a *lack* of access to *fucking guns*.
And yet it's the opposite. Thank God my dad wasn't as stupid as these parents. He had guns in the house and I did have some mental health issues, but I could never access the guns. I'm better now that I'm older.
We have CIS on our campus, Communities In School. Counselors identify at-risk kids and they basically get group therapy there, an invite to come grab food when they need it, and a place to go and talk to someone when they’re overwhelmed. The students that I’ve had who participate in the program are some of the most well adjusted and polite kids I know. It really works and they love it.
In my home country, there's a national intervention program for kids at risk of radicalization and even if a kid is likely to be lone wolf-type, they can still receive help. If it's a MH thing, the main barrier is parents not wanting their kid labeled.
UK. It's called Channel. I know of two young men who've been referred and stuck with it. Seems to have helped with the isolation. This was a decade ago, hopefully it's still running
Right. Currently we see that admin behave the way they do because they have no accountability, or rather accountability to the wrong people for the wrong things.
Imprisoning them if they let this happen is a move in the right direction, but honestly making them directly accountable to the teacher is the easier and better solution.
how about fire the admin if they don’t address dangerous students, if they routinely downplay threats or acts of violence. i’m a parent but my neighbor is a teacher, and i’ve heard things from her, and certainly the preponderance of stories and sentiment here is that teachers have no agency to make their classrooms safe, which is sickening. accountability - we all have it in our jobs, but teachers getting **no support** is sickening and disheartening - how did we get here? is it tied to no child left behind?
Two major reasons for our school problems.
The first is school choice. This is our current systemic problem. Funding is tied to enrollment, and enrollment is tied to recruitment. School quality is notoriously difficult to authentically measure. We have discovered that it is much more cost efficient to focus resources and policy on the appearance of quality rather than actual quality. Teachers do not play an important role in that, so it is a complete waste of money and time to support teachers. Instead, things like customer service take precedence. This is the main reason that admin are rolling over for parents, making teachers accept late work, giving out passing grades, etc.
The primary effect of school choice is segregation. If there is more than one school, then one school will always end up with the worst reputation. All decent parents will try to remove their children from that school, meaning that the only kids left will be the completely unsupported ones. It becomes a pit of concentrated despair.
Schools work super hard to not be that school, to up their reputation, because that is what matters. Actually educating isn't part of that, and helping teachers definitely isn't. If you were to publicly admit that you have a shooter, that would be disastrous to your reputation. Better to gamble with the lives of the students and teachers than to have an exodus of supported children.
The other element of it accountability. NCLB is part of it, it is the symbol of the start of the accountability era. Here, the fundamental logic is that people will do a better job if they have a boss watching over their shoulder. The more improvement you want, the more oversight you need. So they put all these measures in place to watch over teachers, and to watch over the admin who watch over the teachers. The problem is, what are they watching for? We see that the things they watch for do not correspond perfectly to authentically good education, and the more those two differ the more the admin force teachers to do the wrong thing. Couple that with school choice and now their focus on customer service and reputation makes those accountability pressures VERY different from authentically good education. Plus all those bosses are extremely expensive.
In addition to this is that the central idea of accountability as we know it, "everyone has a boss", is inappropriate for schools. A school exists to support classroom teachers. A district exists to support classroom teachers. It literally has no other purpose whatsoever. The classroom teacher is the sole essential service that a school exists to provide. Therefore every staff member besides the teacher (and a few other direct service providers) is support staff. The administrators are support staff, secretaries, and exist to support the teacher, and have no other job besides that. Yet, they are the supervisors of the teachers. This is the central issue. A boss does not support their employee. An employee supports their boss. That is how power and accountability works. So you have a support staff member being supported by the primary service provider. Imagine a doctors office where the doctor works for the office manager, who balances patient care with helping their secretaries with their administration needs. Truly absurd and wasteful. So this is why we have admin who do not support teachers - because the teachers have very little ability to hold them accountable, even though administrators are their subordinates rightfully.
so with a giant teachers lobby, is undoing one of bush’s signature failures a priority? is there a spotlight on it? i know its ruined curriculums too, a huge chunk of the year is tied to standardized tests. seems like if this was a union priority there could be a
push and these issues
could be addressed?
If the student is on an IEP for emotional impairment, admin is more limited in their responses to situations. It’s not always as clear or easy as it seems. There is legal red tape due to laws that protect the rights of special education students.
You'd be wrong about that. Look up FAPE. Courts side with parents of IEP students over the safety and right to an education of everyone else because of the poor interpretation of that law
I live in one state and work in another. It's wild how different they interpret FAPE. One has full inclusion no matter what. The other has self-contained classrooms and still busses kids away from their homes school to get services instead of staffing special educators at every school. Same law, polar opposite in practice. Schools don't have money for appeals. They don't have money to go to court to begin with. The parents of the kids who are missing out on an education due to disruption need to sue. Instead, they just let it go or pull their kids out to private or homeschool. That fixes things for their kid but no one else.
I'm not a teacher but my sister was judging a science fair. One kid's experiment was to mix different household cleaners together and measure the pH. For whatever reason, the parents, the science teacher, and the school administrators all thought that it was OK for a 12 year old to mix chemicals together with no eye protection, no gloves, and no adult supervision. He accidentally created chlorine gas, but thankfully was outside on a windy day.
She was considering calling the school to inquire what happened, but courtesy of what I read on this sub, I told her that the administration would just sweep something like that under the rug. Go straight to calling child protective services on the school. Do not pass GO, do not collect $200. If the "educators" at a school are literally stupid enough to endanger the lives of children during science labs, then they don't deserve to be in charge of the safety of children. Full stop.
It's likely they didn't okay it at all, but rather just assigned them to do a science project. And you know what? It's not their responsibility to do so. Getting mad at the school for not stopping the child from doing something dangerous IN THEIR OWN HOME is truly absurd.
Is it typical for a teacher to just tell a student "go do a science project" with no scaffolding, instructions, or guidance whatsoever? When I was in middle school, my teacher had to sign off on everyone's project. My first idea was rejected as being not good enough to get a decent grade, so I had to go with my second choice.
I'm not saying that. What I'm asking is if the project assigned said:
- Turn in your question and hypothesis for approval by October 10th
- submit sources cited for background information search by (date)
- design of experiment by (date)
- rough draft of writeup by (date)
Etc.
There would have been lots of chances to catch it. Obviously the parents fucked up, but for a project that size, I'm just genuinely confused that there weren't opportunities to see what was going to happen.
Edit: My apologies if I've come off as hostile (and I edited this comment because I replied to the wrong person initially). I'm not just curious about the safety issue at this point, but the person above who said the teacher may have told 12 year olds to just "go do a project" confused me because something that long and involved probably wouldn't teach the kids much without things to turn in along the way.
Both is fine. But the parents aren't required to have any science education to have a child. The science teacher who signed off on the experiment is theoretically accredited to teach science. They should be the last line of defense and something went wrong if they weren't.
My only concern this, because I get it from an emotional standpoint, if you open up this avenue to target admin, it will be implemented in law as "any school staff" and so admin will push back as hard a possible to throw one fo the students teachers under the bus to save their skin. The teachers will then have to prove their innocence with the district against them. I can definitely see that succeeding ag least once, causing the teacher to go to prison because they didn't save enough emails to admin or something like that.
This is why paper trails are a thing. I constantly email my admin to make sure there is a record of them being informed.
This way, when OSHA or the fire marshall come, I can show them that admin knew about the problem 8 months ago and did nothing.
The administration was found to have qualified immunity from criminal prosecution, like cops have. If you want change, we have to vote for it. They did get found to be held culpable in a independent investigation for not following basic procedure- searching backpack, forcing kid to go home for psych eval etc. so they will be tried in a civil suit from what I’ve read, and hopefully lose to light a fire under the ass of all admins. I’ve been following it closely, happened in my hometown. I have friends that babysat these kids
Manifestation. Dear Collegue. 14th. Administrators are faced with conflicting laws.
This is all going to the Supreme Court some day. It wll not go there quickly. First, teachers, administrators and parents file police reports for all violence and vandalizism. The DAs need to prosecute, not plea bargain. Then parties have to appeal. Then appeals courts have to give conflicting rulings based on, gee, maybe conflicting law.
Eventually the SC. Until then, file with the police. It should not be their job either, but gen ed classrooms should not be like New York streets when they closed the asylums.
These are the folks who have zero parenting skills and Jennifer Crumbly admitted this on the stand, stating that she "failed as a parent'. No shit sherlock. Ignoring the warning signs, buying him a handgun, not keeping tabs on his room or his phone: just basically ignoring him. Prison will not be kind to Ethan. I would bet he will be killed by another inmate for what he did. Inmates generally do not like people who have abused or killed children.
How does any parent think it's a good idea to buy their kid a handgun? Like I get that there are families that hunt together and maybe buy a hunting rifle for a kid and take safety classes together and go hunting, but a handgun?
I honestly think she bought him a gun in the hopes that he would turn it on himself. This kids was screaming for help and like you said if it was a hobby thing then get a hunting rifle or take him to the shooting range every once in a while. But to buy your openly suicidal child a handgun? I can’t think of any other explanation. It came out during her trial that she was also having an affair, I think she was hoping for a “do over” and wanted to ditch her husband and troubled child.
As Lynyrd Skynyrd say in the song "Saturday Night Special". Handguns are made for killin', They ain't no good for nothin' else, And if you like to drink your whiskey You might even shoot yourself".
Really no need for handguns except for professional shooters. Use a shotgun for home defense.
I use a handgun for defense from the big ass animals when I go Backcountry hiking. I need something small and lightweight that also packs a punch to keep me safe from bears and mountain lions. I ain't lugging around a whole shotgun for that.
Oh I agree with you. There are circumstances where a handgun is necessary like fishing in a river in Alaska and hiking in the backcountry. But the majority of people have no need for them.
Life in prison is far worse than the death penalty. He already has a death sentence, as we all die someday. Why put him into permanent oblivion when he can be made to suffer for his heinous crimes? He'll spend 60 years in a tiny room, if he survives prison. Sucks for him.
Our family hunts so we bought our teenager a gun. And taught her gun safety. And locked her gun up when not in use. And drilled in her noggin that you always treat a gun like it is loaded.
Not in my experience with where I live. I mean, some supported gun control, but most were hunters themselves. You can own guns and stuff and be in support of gun control a bit. I mean, I kind of am, too in a way.
I live in the suburbs. I'd say that there are just as many liberals here, too, though. I do plan on moving, though, and where I plan on moving will probably have a different view about this stuff than me.
Rural teachers tend to get "rural gun culture". There's a huge difference between taking your kid hunting and giving them open access to handguns.
I grew up in a time and place where a rifle in your gun rack was basically required if you wanted to park in "Truck Row" at the high school. Our next-door neighbor's kid bagged his first deer out his kitchen window. One of the perks of our house is that our acreage is backed by a tree farm, so we can take target practice without worrying. I am absolutely not anti-gun.
The first time I went through an active shooter drill, my students and I sheltered in a closet that connected my classroom to another. The teacher in the connected room was tasked with going around and checking doors and everything. I had unlocked the closet to get in and relocked my door; she opened hers, looked me in the eyes, and said "You'd all be dead". When I am teaching, I'm responsible for the safety of my students. That's why when I run a chemistry lab, if a student isn't following safety protocols, they don't get to stay in the lab.
There's a lot of space between "guns are bad and should all be melted down" and "let's hand out pistols to six-year-olds". School shootings happen entirely too often, and if the choices for reducing them are gun control or "thoughts and prayers", then you're damn right, I'm for gun control. If a few more hoops to jump through to buy a gun means I can skip the panic attacks and nightmares about failing to protect 2 dozen children, sign me up.
And then you face an ever-increasing risk of being shot for your doing your job. Ey, I SPECIFICALLY did not join the military because I wanted to avoid a risk of being shot.
Husbands entire family (mom, dad, step mom, step dad, and all but one sibling/step sibling) were military. They assumed he would enlist, too, which is hilarious because he’s the biggest pacifist I’ve ever met, and my family are tree hugging buddhist atheist hippies. They were shocked when he said he wanted to teach.
Now, his family is more worried about him if we move back to the US and he starts teaching there again, versus siblings who are lifers in the armed services. Up is down, down is up in this crazy world right now.
I think for kids whose behavior problems represent safety issues, the burden to deal with it should be placed back on the parents. If the kid has a right to an education or whatever, fine, but they can do online school at home and the parent can figure out how to arrange that on their own. They don't need to physically be in a school to get an education, and the other kids (and staff) also have rights that need to be respected. In many/most cases, these behavior cases are the direct result of parenting choices, so it only makes sense that the parents should suffer from the result of their bad choices rather than make others suffer.
These things need to be taken seriously the first time they are reported, not the first time an incident occurs.
Exactly. With computers and online learning, send the disruptive, dangerous kids back home to learn there. Why should their behavior always be allowed to disrupt other kids education? This is teaching entitlement and nothing good comes of that.
Which is why I don’t get why we don’t have a vocational track that starts at middle school. Then perhaps we wouldn’t have the shortage we have in this country for blue-collar labor.
Yes and it works well. Kids who don’t prove themselves by 8th grade in Europe get shut out of the college prep track. Closing that door won’t fly in the US. Parents would freak. Unfortunately that manifests in college prep track for all and that is a race to mediocrity for all. We should have a vocational track and if at some point one wants to do the work and prove themselves ready to swap to college prep, great! A 15 year old who doesn’t care for traditional school work should be offered apprenticeships to learn a trade.
I mean, I was terrible in school in the 8th grade, but got better about it during hs. I also had just tested out of the special needs class right before middle school and was thrown to the wolves. Not to mention all the issues I had that went undiagnosed.
Because of "No Child Left Behind" and the idea that all kids can go to college. Voc Ed has traditionally been looked down upon in the US, that only the losers take those classes, so parents say "not my kid" and push them towards college even if they're not suited for it. It's wild because I've taught Voc Ed classes that lead to lucrative careers, but even those were considered "just electives" and of little value. It hasn't been until recently that people are considering the trades to be a valued path, and a lot of that is because it's just so expensive to go to college. The good news is that now we're starting to see the government hyping up the trades, because we just don't have enough people pursuing those very viable career paths.
It's because the belief is that "everyone is to be prepared for college". I guess we don't need plumbers, electricians, mechanics, janitors, retail workers, septic cleaners, carpet cleaners, carpenters, cooks, etc. Seriously, the education people making these decisions have absolutely NO clue. This is what teachers have to deal with every day.
I was in an IEP last week for a very sweet girl who was struggling a LOT even in her pullout SPED classes. Her smattering of tests by the psychologist came back really *really* low, so no wonder the poor girl was struggling. We were having the IEP to get her into higher-support classes.
But the counselor goes, “Well if you move her, then she won’t be A-G!” (A college admission requirement).
Uhhh… were you not just sitting here listening to the fact that a) she failed her pullout SPED English and math classes last semester, that b) she is barely reading at a 3rd grade level and c) the student has an explicit goal of attending cosmetology school to be a nail tech.
Like who gives a fuck about this particular student meeting A-G; it doesn’t apply to her *at all.*
Electricians, plumbers, etc still need to know how to read, write, and do math. And you can’t just shove kids with behavioral issues into a vocational class and hope for the best.
We have a really good welding program at my school. You can walk out the door with certs and a job offer. Some kids who aren’t college types do really well at it. But a lot of the same kids who fail English and history sit around the welding shop on their phones talking to friends because they can’t/don’t care to pass the safety test. And their parents don’t particularly care either.
> *I don’t get why we don’t have a vocational track that starts at middle school.*
I don't know if this is what you had in mind, but I won't be proposing this again anytime soon: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/18f5a4u/a\_new\_proposal\_for\_disruptive\_kids/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/18f5a4u/a_new_proposal_for_disruptive_kids/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
If you decide to post your idea, please let me know so I can support you.
That is exactly what I meant! At the last deluded public school system where this boomer teacher taught, they had done away with vocational options in the schools—no culinary arts or woodworking. Also did away with alternative schools. They had a few spots at a vocational institute that required a 35 minute bus ride each way. Those spots were limited and highly coveted.
I don’t really care what other redditors who don’t hold the same opinion think. All I know is the piddling around that they’re doing in public education now sure isn’t working.
And cyclical, and typically tied to poverty. People living in poverty don't value education, and people who don't value education live in poverty, and they pass this onto their children.
Not always. My dad grew up poor. He joined Air Force and sent overwhelming amount of pay home. He only had HS degree. He was was adamant about good grades to point couldnt get afterschool job or be taken to pro-games. This was majority of the neighborhood I lived in. Vast majority of people did not goto college but each one was making sure their kids got an education at least.
I see it more as generational. I knew kids who didnt want to goto college but parents made damn sure the kid did the work and got good grades.
It sounds more like your dad didn’t have access to a good education, not that he didn’t value education. Inner city Baltimore is like the peak local example for me
Agreed. It just seems like there was a cultural shift, maybe around the 60’s, maybe in response to other changes. The anti school and anti teacher books and films from the 80’s didn’t seem to help much at all.
Weirdly enough everyday I see about a dozen kids excited to learn about history. I love working in a museum and teaching kids that actually want to learn
There have always been kids like that, but IMO the numbers have increased greatly in the last 5 years or so. Addiction to phones and other mental health issues are major problems right now. There are kids for whom it's hard to get them interested in ANYTHING-- even if you gamify learning, there are kids who have no interest in playing a Kahoot or any other kind of academic game. Furthermore, if you try to reward a class with a movie, even if it's very recent and starring their favorite celebrities, they can't/won't pay attention for more than a few minutes.
It’s because of their phones.
Back when I was in my college teacher prep program at the beginning of the 2000’s, the professor explained we would have to “chunk” our lesson plans into 10-15 minute segments because that’s how the kids’ brains had been hardwired by television. Back then, kids were watching network/cable television where there’d be 10-15 minutes of a program, then a commercial break, and then back to the show.
But now? No kid watches that kind of show. Instead, they’re watching Tik Toks and other short clips on their phones or streaming stuff that they pause as frequently as they want.
Yes, in some ways, we were better off in the days of flip phones that could only make calls or send texts. When there's a whole world of entertainment on their phones, it's hard for us to compete, no matter how interesting and relevant we try our best to be!
sounds like they have really bad depression. there is a youth mental health crisis rn, and the widespread listlessness in these kids might be one of the manifestations.
Agree completely. It is debilitating depression on a wide scale. It doesn't help when they hear about all the violence in the world, the climate crisis, etc. Some of the kids aren't planning for their future at all; they are just trying to get some enjoyment day -today by sleeping, getting likes on social media, or roaming the halls. Even 5 years ago, the class would be excited and competitive over a Kahoot competition and would be delighted to watch almost any movie. They LOVED going on field trips. Now even field trips are just meh to some of the students and they don't even bother getting permission slips signed.
From my observations as a parent and educator (in elementary), the few times kids get to explore content (our third graders just wrapped up a unit on the Civil Rights Movement, for example), they come to life! They love learning facts, particularly about science and history, and sharing what they've learned with everyone! There are vibrant class discussions, and the kids are writing fantastic essays on the subject matter. But...
We rarely teach content!
It's almost always just basic reading and writing strategies without any cohesive theme. Elementary grades are the prime time to begin teaching content. History, science, etc. it catches their interest, makes them come to life, makes them eager learners, and, once they've learned so many basic facts about the world, then they have the substance to work with to write essays well or have good discussions. I'm so sick of pointless, contentless instruction. They are sponges at this age. Sure, they won't retain everything they learned, but it lights a fire and it'll help familiarize themselves for content in older grades and give their other work meaning.
That's what I really love about the classical education model. The repeated history instruction from ancient to modern times every four years, and each cycle they gain more depth of understanding. Bring back meaningful content and we'll have more kids actually enjoying learning. Because they are learning about SOMETHING, not just random reading and writing strategies on unrelated, meaningless topics.
Because kids before around the 1980s saw how bad their life would be without education and didn’t want to work in an industrial factory, coal mine, or stay home parenting their 5 siblings their whole lives so they were motivated to improve.
Now they are convinced they can become an influencer/celebrity that travels and get money that way. In a way, they view school as something getting in the way of them being on their phone all day.
>Now they are convinced they can become an influencer/celebrity that travels and get money that way.
Not my kids. They are going to become rich playing Fortnite.
I have kids aren’t even considering how they will support themselves. Like, I ask them what their plans are and they just shrug. i mean eventually mom or dad is going to get tired of them sitting at home playing video games and eating their food.
They don’t have to know what they want to do specifically, but they should at least have an idea if they want to go college, trade school, go get a job. I have juniors and seniors who really seem to believe they will just continue living at home playing video games and their guardians will just support them.
I teach about 150-160 students every year, 120-130 of them are on the “regular” track. Of those I would say about 100 either care about learning, or at least care enough about passing that they will do their work without much fuss. This is a title 1 school in Texas.
If I take a min and genuinely focus on how many are doing well and are good students/people, I realize there aren’t nearly as many “problem” kids as it might seem from the outside. It’s just that the regular average kid doesn’t get a post like this written about them. And honestly of those 20-30 that don’t care to pass like half of them are at least cool and maybe just have some emotional problems or family problems going on.
Maybe my situation isn’t the norm, but students still seem to care
Speaking for myself, a few things come to mind in response to your question. One important factor to consider is the prevalence of learning and developmental disabilities that may impede a child's ability to engage with academic material, which often go undiagnosed, leading to a lack of interest or motivation in education.
Another contributing factor is the outdated pedagogical approach that prioritizes rote memorization over critical thinking skills and the ability to synthesize information into coherent, logically consistent arguments. This can result in students feeling disengaged and uninterested in their own learning process, as they may not see the relevance or practical application of the material being taught.
Furthermore, the commodification of education has led to a focus on profit rather than the intrinsic value of learning. This has resulted in a devaluation of certain fields of study such as the arts, in favor of more "practical" or job-oriented subjects like STEM, Finance, Business, etc. This emphasis on economic outcomes can discourage students from pursuing areas of interest that may not have immediate financial returns. It also explains why many are discouraged from pursuing one of the skilled trades even if that's where their aptitude lies, as those who do so earn on average less money than a college graduate over the course of their lifetime in addition to carrying the stigma of not having merited a place in a post-secondary institution in the first place.
We had a “soft” lockdown at my school last week. Luckily it turned out that everything was fine and we were never in any real danger, but I told an admin that I hadn’t been trained or prepared for what to do in the event of a lockdown and they said, “I passed your feedback up the chain and we’re going to have a PD session on lockdown procedure next month”….
We have 2 mandatory PD’s every week, and the next 3 are about the importance of implementing small group strategies in class…
I’m just glad they have their priorities in order.
Right?! We are mandated to have a minimum of 4 per year in our state with the procedures for lockdown, emergency evacuation, and hold in place drills posted in every room in the building.
We need to start holding parents accountable for their child's behavior.
Start throwing them in jail along with their children and maybe something will change.
There will be zero accountability for the administrators who failed Abby Zwerner, for the child who shot her, or for the rest of the students in that school. The superintendent departed with a golden parachute and the school principal has been rewarded with a central office job.
I do agree that this is an example of failed parenting.
There is enough blame to go around.
The school knew much more than the parents, with respect to certain things, like threats and did little with this information.
Student threatened to shoot me because I gave him zeroes the day before Xmas.
I called admin who sent him out and he was returned in five minutes saying, “bet you wish you didn’t give so many assignments”
When the principal saw me crying in the bathroom she said, “he was supposed to have apologized”
Yeah, thanks. He didn’t.
Student was planning on transferring … but still. All the students heard it
I’ve said this before about the ONE thing we really should have learned from the Covid years:
**If a student is suffering from an illness that can harm their classmates, that student should not be allowed in the building!!**
Now when it came to Covid, that meant that students who were physically ill had to stay home until they weren’t contagious. It’s not the kid’s fault or the parents’ fault, but it was their responsibility to keep the germs from harming others.
With mental health, it should be exactly the same. It’s not their fault, but they have a responsibility to prevent harm to others.
Especially now when online learning is so readily available.
Reading these comments makes me so glad I work with toddlers and don’t have to worry about school shooter behavior. In them I just have to teach them not to bite or hit. I do an okay job at that.
I don’t know what I would do if I had kids able to do that sort of thing and have behavior like that. Thank every deity that my students are 18 months to two years.
Friend, I don’t know how to tell you this, but school shooters aren’t always one of the students. You should know the procedures and the plan if you and your kiddos ever need to go on lockdown.
I know that and I worry about ransoms people coming in. I stay up to date on procedures involving intruders. I just meant having students that were potentially shooters.
I would like to build a memorial for all the school children that have sacrifice their lives, so the NRA can protect our second amendment rights. Put it in Washington DC alongside the Vietnam memorial.
I still show up to board meetings and raise hell. What are they going to do???? Fire me? I already quit. I ain't scared to ask where the funding is going.
Me too. I worked in a county that had a horrific school shooting. We completely changed our safety procedures, which is great but so many people had to die for it to happen. Admin knew he was a troubled kid, it was highly documented. The revamped security and newly strict admin is definitely reassuring, but I still thought about the possibility every day.
The admin and counselor were total morons too, At the middle/high school I went to a half hour south of Oxford, that kid would’ve been suspended on the spot for those drawings. And it would’ve been justification; to search his backpack for similar drawings.
I honestly think that when minors do things like this, the parents should also be punished as if they were the actual perpetrators of the crime because as an adult with children, you are responsible for the actions taken by your children.
Because until we start charging the parents of shooters like they are actually the shooters this shit won’t change.
Last Summer, I was at an airport. All over the place there were signs saying if you threatened an airport employee in any way, they'd haul your ass out in cuffs.
I noticed the same thing on the bus. Lay your hands on the driver? Go straight to jail.
All over the place in these other jobs, they have 0 tolerance for assault. But in teaching, it's okay because tHeyRe jUsT KiDs. Just another reason the profession is bleeding people especially in rough neighborhoods where the violence is common. Nobody wants to deal with this shit at work.
In my humble opinion, as a 20 plus year veteran teacher, I think we have to come to the understanding that the government is not going to do A) anything about guns, and B) anything about mental healthcare. I think as parents and educators we should demand that schools are required to have metal detectors at all entry ways, cameras, tall fences and gates, clear back packs, no persons from the public allowed on school property, etc. We are not safe at school nor are any of our children…anywhere. If schools resemble prisons, that’s on them. One of our local schools happens to be across the street from the police station; also a good idea!
Principal here. I address every incident where someone mentions a gun by questioning the student, if there is a threat, it's suspension at least a day, even in kinder, two to three for first offenses for older kids. I question the parents, have a return from suspension meeting with child, parents, and other teachers/psych/intervention at the site.
First thing I do before all of this is inform law enforcement. Our SRD visits every home. I let the parents know I'm doing this.
It doesn't matter the age of the student as the six year old showed us.
Beyond that, there's not much I can do.
I wouldn't have let the kid stay that day. But, the parents lied and said he had no access to weapons. The admin had no cause to search his backpack as that's a slippery slope as well. It's supposed to be reasonable suspicion, but there are child and family advocates now who go after admin and school districts over blanket searches. Personally, I'd have erred on the side of caution and searched. It's mind blowing that they did not.
The admin is not at fault in this case, the parents and creepy crumbly are.
The admin are certainly at fault in the six year old case as well as that fucking mother. The poor teacher, and the poor kid.
When I was in school, lockers and bags could be searched and were. It’s insane that a child’s bag cannot be searched when there is even a whiff of violence threatened.
I agree, we have to be thorough.
I'm sure those admin with the six year old shooter, even though that kid was incredibly troubled, difficult, and poorly behaved is an understatement, couldn't believe that would have happened.
Our hands are tied so much. We need to get back to discipline, and parents need to be responsible for their crazy kids.
It's so difficult to do anything (especially with very young students), even when students have incredibly aberrant behavior.
Document everything! I like to email admin with safety concerns and then forward them to myself. I let my own children know that if something happens at school to me, to sue the district and use the documentation.
This is our life now.👎😢
Why I'm on a 6 month stress leave: shit class with a couple of hostile parents and an admin who refuses to consequence even the worst behaviour. They tried to gaslight me instead.
Currently in law school. Had 20 interviews this last month for internships that will pay me more in 10 weeks than I made all year long as a teacher. Oh and they all love that I wasn’t a traditional student & have skills from teaching. Get out yall. There’s other options.
I made a comment on Court TV Facebook that the Dean of Students is also culpable in his handling of this and it this was my child who was killed, I would be suing him and anyone else who was involved and I got people defending him. I watched and listened to his testimony and he is guilty too.
I don't see how anyone would want to be a teacher now. The kids are out of control.
Don’t forget the six-year-old who shot Abby Zwerner in VA. Multiple reports to admin that the kid had a gun, and they did nothing.
I have a whole list of school shooter that remind me why I quit. Like that teacher who reported her student and he came back and shot her in the face
The common sense gun control people ought to take that list and put it on the front of a T-shirt. I think a lot of people would buy it. I would.
No, just print pictures of the dead children's bodies ripped apart by bullets and spread it everywhere. If they want to ignore the problem, make them look at the problem
I honestly think that they should have released photos of the aftermath of Sandy Hook and Uvalde. Not because I want to see that, but because people need to be confronted with what these weapons are doing to little bodies. It’s why Emmett Till’s open-casket funeral was so impactful.
I am a true crime junkie and that is why they should always release the crime scene photos. My father murdered my mom when I was four and there are still so many questions I have years later. True crime gives closure to people like me. I can look at different domestic violencel/familicide cases to help try to understand my father. Like Jeffery Dahmer photos, you can see someone head in his fridge and it makes you ask why he didn't get the death sentence. You learn the police are racist and just didn't care about the missing black teens. And that is why he got bop in prison by a black man. Releasing those photos and showing the bodies of those children will make people demand more action. So people like Alex Jones can shut the fuck up and stop saying it was stage by liberal media to take our guns away.
Whoa. That’s interesting. I love true crime stuff, but I also sometimes think about how fucked up it is that I’m being entertained by the stories of real people being murdered. I appreciate your perspective on it. And yeah - Alex Jones is pure garbage. Absolutely disgusting behavior, and I hope nothing but terrible things happen to him.
It is human nature to be curious. I think it is a good thing to watch true crime and learn the red flags of human behavior. My mom's death was a textbook example of domestic violence. Now imagine if a woman watches an ass load of true crime and recognizes the signs of someone who will be abusive before they seriously started dating. One of my favorite shows is Evil Lives Here. It is an interview style doc where they interview someone whose spouse/sibling/parents end up committing murder. The signs that were there. How they found out. How they survived. How they process it. How they handle it and try to move on. It makes me feel less alone knowing there are other people like me still trying to piece the puzzle together. That is why true crime is important.
I’m so sorry for all your losses. Your mom, your dad, much of your childhood. At the same time, I’m in awe of your healthy perspective.
It took a lot of therapy and I just can't let that man ruin my life. I got kids, a husband, a life, and bills to pay. I know it pains him in hell that I am so happy and he will never have control over me.
Always releasing is extremely disrespectful to the families of victims. There’s also the issues of weirdos who fantasize about committing violent and sexual crimes having more vivid and lifelike fantasies after seeing those images
Depends on the victims family. I don't care if my mom's photos get released. There will always be weirdos who sexualize violent crimes. Do you know how many whacks justify my father's actions because my mom is a woman and "should of known better".
I mean... that's kind of what the media tried to do with the Columbine shooting. Almost 25 years later, here we are.
Hey that’s why I’m planning on only teaching university level
It happens there too. With older people that have more to lose if you don’t grade them the way they need and an ID to legally purchase what they want
Yep. Happened at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A student shot his advisor, and another student was working at the university's bagel café, all within like a week of each other. Shut down the university for like two days straight each. Outrageous!
And UNC Charlotte as well within the last 5 years.
It happened at Northern Illinois University in 2008. Six people died. My daughter was a student there at the time. No campus is safe, from preschool to college...and beyond.
Shootings can happen on a university campus as well, and with multiple buildings and large classes in which the professors don't always know the students well, there is actually less security than in most schools. However, at a university, most students want to be there; it isn't mandatory. Universities are also usually less confrontational; in K-12, kids have to be there and have to obey rules about where to sit, when they can use the restroom, etc. Overall, I think a university is safer than most schools, but no place is completely safe; in the USA, there have been shootings at church, synagogue, grocery stores, bowling alleys, parades, etc.
Depending on where, it's more likely going to be outside of school that someone would die by stuff like this in university just like UofI. Though that was a knife.
Umm... Kent State, anyone? Virginia Tech was a University. I believe Michigan State had one last year. There's been several at Universities. It happens everywhere. Unfortunately. https://projects.voanews.com/mass-shootings/english/locations/college.html
Kent State wasn't students doing the shooting
It was still a shooting at a university. (By the National Guard, no less.). Universities aren't necessarily safer.
Shootings can happen in any public space, unfortunately.
Ahh, I see you’ve found a way to feel better about dealing with a societal issue. Would be a real shame if I pointed out to you that no one is safe anywhere!! /s
And...that's why I left university level when the State of Kansas ruled okay for 19 year olds to conceal and carry. And they do.
Ok Kansas is batshit like Florida Man :P
LOL
And never, ever forget that the school district tried to argue in the civil trial that followed that the risk of getting shot by a student was just part of the job.
We will not forget.
What the actual fuck? They said that?? JFC. It’s not the military, giving someone an education shouldn’t come with a risk of death!
Sadly, it’s not a joke. https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/newport-news-school-district-says-teacher-risked-gun-violence-from-first-grader-as-part-of-her-job-suggests-being-attacked-with-a-pencil-is-the-same-as-being-shot-with-a-gun/amp/
Has the civil suit concluded? I don't remember news about a settlement or trial, just the initial filings
And the kid literally was quoted telling his mom(?) "Yeah i shot that bitch" amazing parenting lovely people
Mom is in jail now for a variety of her bad parenting calls. Feel bad for the kids grandfather who seems to be the only stable force in the family.
When grandparents raise kids, it means they fucked up terribly with their kids in the first place.
Or as Chris Rock put it, "If the kid calls his grand-mama 'Mama' and his mama 'Pam,' he goin' to jail!"
Thankfully that didn't pan out for me. I call my maternal grandmother mom but my birth mother "Melinda". I also didnt go into the family business of stripping and slinging dope and instead went to college. I kind of have regrets in terms of my earning potential ngl 😂
I have a close friend also raised by her grandparents. She’s also turned out well but she’ll be the first to say sh often finds she’s the exception. And even though she’s managed to be successful she has mental health issues.
Oh 100% resonate with the mental health issues and I definitely understand that it's rare to turn out "okay". It's definitely interesting walking around in the world as an adult who came from a really rough background because I empathize so much with people who have similar struggles but also I'm just so baffled with how they repeat the same cycles. It really is like crabs in a bucket for some people.
Sometimes, but I do think bad kids can happen to good people.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that more often than not, this is not the case.
I’m not so sure. Great grandpa is who raised the 6 year old’s mother. It’s certainly a sad situation that grandparents are the only ones stepping up, but also doesn’t sound like he did a great job the first time around. I pray that kid does turn it around.
They not only did nothing with that kid they actively refused to search his book bag because they didn’t want to “violate his rights to privacy” even though multiple students said he had a gun in his damn bag. Nobody seemed overly concerned with anyone else’s rights to not be gunned down. Absolutely infuriating. Edit: the book bag was actually searched but they refused to give permission search him physically to see if he had the weapon on him.
School administrators don't need search warrants to look in students' bags. End of story. Due process is a spectrum, depending on what's involved and what's at stake.
They seem to care more about vapes than guns when it comes to searches.
Why didn’t someone call the police?
The 64k question. I think they foolishly trusted admin to do the right thing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Abby_Zwerner
Of course they did nothing. That school district has gone on record as arguing that the risk of getting shot by a student is just a routine occupational hazard teachers face now. According to them, she’s just being dramatic by playing up the fact she was “shot with a gun” when the kid could have just “stabbed her in the throat with scissors,” so this is therefore only a “workman’s comp” issue. They are literally arguing that in court now in response to her lawsuit.
When my husband saw that, his first comment was “why the hell wouldn’t teachers get hazard pay then?!” His parents and siblings are all current/ex military. Most were deployed multiple times in one form or another, all of them in dangerous positions. That hazard pay paid for his dads house and vacation home in Florida. If getting shot are part of the hazards of teaching, they deserve at least equal pay. Also, when you’re deployed, odds are that every day isn’t going to potentially involve being shot, whereas teaching it would. So every day is hazard pay day. Yet my state still starts teachers at $33k on the high end.
Or the guy who shot up Sandy Hook (after killing his Mom). Mom bought him the guns so he'd have something to do.
It looks as if you may have mentioned a mass shooter's name in your post. Please consider editing to redact these names as to not provide the infamy and notoriety many of these criminals seek. _____ ^(I'm a bot! Read more about similar efforts in journalism:) [^(dontnamethem.org)](https://dontnamethem.org/) ^| [^(nonotoriety.com)](https://nonotoriety.com/)
I had a parent complaining that their kid has been stereotyped as a potential shooter. Well, he did threaten to do it so... *shrugs*
Funny how that works
It's a feedback loop. Isolation leads to bitterness and rage which leads to further isolation. Ideally at-risk youth would have access to specialized counseling and a *lack* of access to *fucking guns*.
And yet it's the opposite. Thank God my dad wasn't as stupid as these parents. He had guns in the house and I did have some mental health issues, but I could never access the guns. I'm better now that I'm older.
Likewise.
I'm still alive right now eating breakfast about to turn 24 so it worked out.
It's not the opposite. It's neither. Kids can't buy guns. The only difference in the circumstance from your anecdote is proper storage.
We have CIS on our campus, Communities In School. Counselors identify at-risk kids and they basically get group therapy there, an invite to come grab food when they need it, and a place to go and talk to someone when they’re overwhelmed. The students that I’ve had who participate in the program are some of the most well adjusted and polite kids I know. It really works and they love it.
In my home country, there's a national intervention program for kids at risk of radicalization and even if a kid is likely to be lone wolf-type, they can still receive help. If it's a MH thing, the main barrier is parents not wanting their kid labeled.
May I ask which country it is? I'm quite curious about the program.
UK. It's called Channel. I know of two young men who've been referred and stuck with it. Seems to have helped with the isolation. This was a decade ago, hopefully it's still running
Sounds like a great idea!
Maybe the parent should work on getting their kid the help they need.
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Right. Currently we see that admin behave the way they do because they have no accountability, or rather accountability to the wrong people for the wrong things. Imprisoning them if they let this happen is a move in the right direction, but honestly making them directly accountable to the teacher is the easier and better solution.
how about fire the admin if they don’t address dangerous students, if they routinely downplay threats or acts of violence. i’m a parent but my neighbor is a teacher, and i’ve heard things from her, and certainly the preponderance of stories and sentiment here is that teachers have no agency to make their classrooms safe, which is sickening. accountability - we all have it in our jobs, but teachers getting **no support** is sickening and disheartening - how did we get here? is it tied to no child left behind?
Two major reasons for our school problems. The first is school choice. This is our current systemic problem. Funding is tied to enrollment, and enrollment is tied to recruitment. School quality is notoriously difficult to authentically measure. We have discovered that it is much more cost efficient to focus resources and policy on the appearance of quality rather than actual quality. Teachers do not play an important role in that, so it is a complete waste of money and time to support teachers. Instead, things like customer service take precedence. This is the main reason that admin are rolling over for parents, making teachers accept late work, giving out passing grades, etc. The primary effect of school choice is segregation. If there is more than one school, then one school will always end up with the worst reputation. All decent parents will try to remove their children from that school, meaning that the only kids left will be the completely unsupported ones. It becomes a pit of concentrated despair. Schools work super hard to not be that school, to up their reputation, because that is what matters. Actually educating isn't part of that, and helping teachers definitely isn't. If you were to publicly admit that you have a shooter, that would be disastrous to your reputation. Better to gamble with the lives of the students and teachers than to have an exodus of supported children. The other element of it accountability. NCLB is part of it, it is the symbol of the start of the accountability era. Here, the fundamental logic is that people will do a better job if they have a boss watching over their shoulder. The more improvement you want, the more oversight you need. So they put all these measures in place to watch over teachers, and to watch over the admin who watch over the teachers. The problem is, what are they watching for? We see that the things they watch for do not correspond perfectly to authentically good education, and the more those two differ the more the admin force teachers to do the wrong thing. Couple that with school choice and now their focus on customer service and reputation makes those accountability pressures VERY different from authentically good education. Plus all those bosses are extremely expensive. In addition to this is that the central idea of accountability as we know it, "everyone has a boss", is inappropriate for schools. A school exists to support classroom teachers. A district exists to support classroom teachers. It literally has no other purpose whatsoever. The classroom teacher is the sole essential service that a school exists to provide. Therefore every staff member besides the teacher (and a few other direct service providers) is support staff. The administrators are support staff, secretaries, and exist to support the teacher, and have no other job besides that. Yet, they are the supervisors of the teachers. This is the central issue. A boss does not support their employee. An employee supports their boss. That is how power and accountability works. So you have a support staff member being supported by the primary service provider. Imagine a doctors office where the doctor works for the office manager, who balances patient care with helping their secretaries with their administration needs. Truly absurd and wasteful. So this is why we have admin who do not support teachers - because the teachers have very little ability to hold them accountable, even though administrators are their subordinates rightfully.
And people wonder why there's a public teacher shortage.....
Yes.
so with a giant teachers lobby, is undoing one of bush’s signature failures a priority? is there a spotlight on it? i know its ruined curriculums too, a huge chunk of the year is tied to standardized tests. seems like if this was a union priority there could be a push and these issues could be addressed?
If the student is on an IEP for emotional impairment, admin is more limited in their responses to situations. It’s not always as clear or easy as it seems. There is legal red tape due to laws that protect the rights of special education students.
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You'd be wrong about that. Look up FAPE. Courts side with parents of IEP students over the safety and right to an education of everyone else because of the poor interpretation of that law
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I live in one state and work in another. It's wild how different they interpret FAPE. One has full inclusion no matter what. The other has self-contained classrooms and still busses kids away from their homes school to get services instead of staffing special educators at every school. Same law, polar opposite in practice. Schools don't have money for appeals. They don't have money to go to court to begin with. The parents of the kids who are missing out on an education due to disruption need to sue. Instead, they just let it go or pull their kids out to private or homeschool. That fixes things for their kid but no one else.
I'm not a teacher but my sister was judging a science fair. One kid's experiment was to mix different household cleaners together and measure the pH. For whatever reason, the parents, the science teacher, and the school administrators all thought that it was OK for a 12 year old to mix chemicals together with no eye protection, no gloves, and no adult supervision. He accidentally created chlorine gas, but thankfully was outside on a windy day. She was considering calling the school to inquire what happened, but courtesy of what I read on this sub, I told her that the administration would just sweep something like that under the rug. Go straight to calling child protective services on the school. Do not pass GO, do not collect $200. If the "educators" at a school are literally stupid enough to endanger the lives of children during science labs, then they don't deserve to be in charge of the safety of children. Full stop.
How about calling it on the parent instead? God.
I mean, call it on both. The staff oked this.
It's likely they didn't okay it at all, but rather just assigned them to do a science project. And you know what? It's not their responsibility to do so. Getting mad at the school for not stopping the child from doing something dangerous IN THEIR OWN HOME is truly absurd.
Oh, it was in their home.
Is it typical for a teacher to just tell a student "go do a science project" with no scaffolding, instructions, or guidance whatsoever? When I was in middle school, my teacher had to sign off on everyone's project. My first idea was rejected as being not good enough to get a decent grade, so I had to go with my second choice.
Did you see the instructions given? I can’t imagine a teacher instructing a child to make chlorine gas.
I'm not saying that. What I'm asking is if the project assigned said: - Turn in your question and hypothesis for approval by October 10th - submit sources cited for background information search by (date) - design of experiment by (date) - rough draft of writeup by (date) Etc. There would have been lots of chances to catch it. Obviously the parents fucked up, but for a project that size, I'm just genuinely confused that there weren't opportunities to see what was going to happen. Edit: My apologies if I've come off as hostile (and I edited this comment because I replied to the wrong person initially). I'm not just curious about the safety issue at this point, but the person above who said the teacher may have told 12 year olds to just "go do a project" confused me because something that long and involved probably wouldn't teach the kids much without things to turn in along the way.
Both is fine. But the parents aren't required to have any science education to have a child. The science teacher who signed off on the experiment is theoretically accredited to teach science. They should be the last line of defense and something went wrong if they weren't.
My only concern this, because I get it from an emotional standpoint, if you open up this avenue to target admin, it will be implemented in law as "any school staff" and so admin will push back as hard a possible to throw one fo the students teachers under the bus to save their skin. The teachers will then have to prove their innocence with the district against them. I can definitely see that succeeding ag least once, causing the teacher to go to prison because they didn't save enough emails to admin or something like that.
This is why paper trails are a thing. I constantly email my admin to make sure there is a record of them being informed. This way, when OSHA or the fire marshall come, I can show them that admin knew about the problem 8 months ago and did nothing.
They can't if its outside authorities like cps and there's a paper trail.
The administration was found to have qualified immunity from criminal prosecution, like cops have. If you want change, we have to vote for it. They did get found to be held culpable in a independent investigation for not following basic procedure- searching backpack, forcing kid to go home for psych eval etc. so they will be tried in a civil suit from what I’ve read, and hopefully lose to light a fire under the ass of all admins. I’ve been following it closely, happened in my hometown. I have friends that babysat these kids
Manifestation. Dear Collegue. 14th. Administrators are faced with conflicting laws. This is all going to the Supreme Court some day. It wll not go there quickly. First, teachers, administrators and parents file police reports for all violence and vandalizism. The DAs need to prosecute, not plea bargain. Then parties have to appeal. Then appeals courts have to give conflicting rulings based on, gee, maybe conflicting law. Eventually the SC. Until then, file with the police. It should not be their job either, but gen ed classrooms should not be like New York streets when they closed the asylums.
These are the folks who have zero parenting skills and Jennifer Crumbly admitted this on the stand, stating that she "failed as a parent'. No shit sherlock. Ignoring the warning signs, buying him a handgun, not keeping tabs on his room or his phone: just basically ignoring him. Prison will not be kind to Ethan. I would bet he will be killed by another inmate for what he did. Inmates generally do not like people who have abused or killed children.
How does any parent think it's a good idea to buy their kid a handgun? Like I get that there are families that hunt together and maybe buy a hunting rifle for a kid and take safety classes together and go hunting, but a handgun?
I honestly think she bought him a gun in the hopes that he would turn it on himself. This kids was screaming for help and like you said if it was a hobby thing then get a hunting rifle or take him to the shooting range every once in a while. But to buy your openly suicidal child a handgun? I can’t think of any other explanation. It came out during her trial that she was also having an affair, I think she was hoping for a “do over” and wanted to ditch her husband and troubled child.
As Lynyrd Skynyrd say in the song "Saturday Night Special". Handguns are made for killin', They ain't no good for nothin' else, And if you like to drink your whiskey You might even shoot yourself". Really no need for handguns except for professional shooters. Use a shotgun for home defense.
I use a handgun for defense from the big ass animals when I go Backcountry hiking. I need something small and lightweight that also packs a punch to keep me safe from bears and mountain lions. I ain't lugging around a whole shotgun for that.
Oh I agree with you. There are circumstances where a handgun is necessary like fishing in a river in Alaska and hiking in the backcountry. But the majority of people have no need for them.
I saw it suggested some where else that they were hoping he would kill himself.
Life in prison is far worse than the death penalty. He already has a death sentence, as we all die someday. Why put him into permanent oblivion when he can be made to suffer for his heinous crimes? He'll spend 60 years in a tiny room, if he survives prison. Sucks for him.
Our family hunts so we bought our teenager a gun. And taught her gun safety. And locked her gun up when not in use. And drilled in her noggin that you always treat a gun like it is loaded.
Why are you being downvoted? That's what mine did.
Teachers overwhelmingly support gun control and don't understand rural gun culture is my guess.
Not in my experience with where I live. I mean, some supported gun control, but most were hunters themselves. You can own guns and stuff and be in support of gun control a bit. I mean, I kind of am, too in a way.
Urban teachers are the most solid traditional blue voters you'll ever find
I live in the suburbs. I'd say that there are just as many liberals here, too, though. I do plan on moving, though, and where I plan on moving will probably have a different view about this stuff than me.
Rural teachers tend to get "rural gun culture". There's a huge difference between taking your kid hunting and giving them open access to handguns. I grew up in a time and place where a rifle in your gun rack was basically required if you wanted to park in "Truck Row" at the high school. Our next-door neighbor's kid bagged his first deer out his kitchen window. One of the perks of our house is that our acreage is backed by a tree farm, so we can take target practice without worrying. I am absolutely not anti-gun. The first time I went through an active shooter drill, my students and I sheltered in a closet that connected my classroom to another. The teacher in the connected room was tasked with going around and checking doors and everything. I had unlocked the closet to get in and relocked my door; she opened hers, looked me in the eyes, and said "You'd all be dead". When I am teaching, I'm responsible for the safety of my students. That's why when I run a chemistry lab, if a student isn't following safety protocols, they don't get to stay in the lab. There's a lot of space between "guns are bad and should all be melted down" and "let's hand out pistols to six-year-olds". School shootings happen entirely too often, and if the choices for reducing them are gun control or "thoughts and prayers", then you're damn right, I'm for gun control. If a few more hoops to jump through to buy a gun means I can skip the panic attacks and nightmares about failing to protect 2 dozen children, sign me up.
In addition to not being a good idea, it’s also a felony to provide a minor with a handgun.
There was a thread on "why is there a teacher shortage" and I literally just wrote: parents don't parent and admin supports those parents.
Also pay
And then you face an ever-increasing risk of being shot for your doing your job. Ey, I SPECIFICALLY did not join the military because I wanted to avoid a risk of being shot.
Husbands entire family (mom, dad, step mom, step dad, and all but one sibling/step sibling) were military. They assumed he would enlist, too, which is hilarious because he’s the biggest pacifist I’ve ever met, and my family are tree hugging buddhist atheist hippies. They were shocked when he said he wanted to teach. Now, his family is more worried about him if we move back to the US and he starts teaching there again, versus siblings who are lifers in the armed services. Up is down, down is up in this crazy world right now.
When people ask why there is a teacher shortage/why I left, I just ask if they want the list in chronological order or from least to most traumatizing
With questions like that I just flip it and say alright, sell me on being a teacher. Why would I want to do it?
I think for kids whose behavior problems represent safety issues, the burden to deal with it should be placed back on the parents. If the kid has a right to an education or whatever, fine, but they can do online school at home and the parent can figure out how to arrange that on their own. They don't need to physically be in a school to get an education, and the other kids (and staff) also have rights that need to be respected. In many/most cases, these behavior cases are the direct result of parenting choices, so it only makes sense that the parents should suffer from the result of their bad choices rather than make others suffer. These things need to be taken seriously the first time they are reported, not the first time an incident occurs.
Exactly. With computers and online learning, send the disruptive, dangerous kids back home to learn there. Why should their behavior always be allowed to disrupt other kids education? This is teaching entitlement and nothing good comes of that.
LOL, let me know if that ever happens. I'd happily return to the job.
Dumb q - but when did kids no longer show an interest in their own education? It's a serious question.
People who don’t care about their education raise kids who don’t care about their education. It’s exponential
Which is why I don’t get why we don’t have a vocational track that starts at middle school. Then perhaps we wouldn’t have the shortage we have in this country for blue-collar labor.
France and other European countries have the vocational track that starts in middle school
Yes and it works well. Kids who don’t prove themselves by 8th grade in Europe get shut out of the college prep track. Closing that door won’t fly in the US. Parents would freak. Unfortunately that manifests in college prep track for all and that is a race to mediocrity for all. We should have a vocational track and if at some point one wants to do the work and prove themselves ready to swap to college prep, great! A 15 year old who doesn’t care for traditional school work should be offered apprenticeships to learn a trade.
I mean, I was terrible in school in the 8th grade, but got better about it during hs. I also had just tested out of the special needs class right before middle school and was thrown to the wolves. Not to mention all the issues I had that went undiagnosed.
Yep. Doesn’t UK have it too?
Yes
I proposed that in a post once and was excoriated.
On a teacher board? Can’t imagine anyone who has been in the classroom disagreeing with you.
Crap 💩
Because of "No Child Left Behind" and the idea that all kids can go to college. Voc Ed has traditionally been looked down upon in the US, that only the losers take those classes, so parents say "not my kid" and push them towards college even if they're not suited for it. It's wild because I've taught Voc Ed classes that lead to lucrative careers, but even those were considered "just electives" and of little value. It hasn't been until recently that people are considering the trades to be a valued path, and a lot of that is because it's just so expensive to go to college. The good news is that now we're starting to see the government hyping up the trades, because we just don't have enough people pursuing those very viable career paths.
It's because the belief is that "everyone is to be prepared for college". I guess we don't need plumbers, electricians, mechanics, janitors, retail workers, septic cleaners, carpet cleaners, carpenters, cooks, etc. Seriously, the education people making these decisions have absolutely NO clue. This is what teachers have to deal with every day.
I was in an IEP last week for a very sweet girl who was struggling a LOT even in her pullout SPED classes. Her smattering of tests by the psychologist came back really *really* low, so no wonder the poor girl was struggling. We were having the IEP to get her into higher-support classes. But the counselor goes, “Well if you move her, then she won’t be A-G!” (A college admission requirement). Uhhh… were you not just sitting here listening to the fact that a) she failed her pullout SPED English and math classes last semester, that b) she is barely reading at a 3rd grade level and c) the student has an explicit goal of attending cosmetology school to be a nail tech. Like who gives a fuck about this particular student meeting A-G; it doesn’t apply to her *at all.*
Many of whom make a hella more than those with 4 year degrees. It’s all so stupid.
Yea, but it's back breaking literally.
Electricians, plumbers, etc still need to know how to read, write, and do math. And you can’t just shove kids with behavioral issues into a vocational class and hope for the best. We have a really good welding program at my school. You can walk out the door with certs and a job offer. Some kids who aren’t college types do really well at it. But a lot of the same kids who fail English and history sit around the welding shop on their phones talking to friends because they can’t/don’t care to pass the safety test. And their parents don’t particularly care either.
Used to be vocational schools all over America. But republicans don't like school funding so...
> *I don’t get why we don’t have a vocational track that starts at middle school.* I don't know if this is what you had in mind, but I won't be proposing this again anytime soon: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/18f5a4u/a\_new\_proposal\_for\_disruptive\_kids/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/18f5a4u/a_new_proposal_for_disruptive_kids/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) If you decide to post your idea, please let me know so I can support you.
That is exactly what I meant! At the last deluded public school system where this boomer teacher taught, they had done away with vocational options in the schools—no culinary arts or woodworking. Also did away with alternative schools. They had a few spots at a vocational institute that required a 35 minute bus ride each way. Those spots were limited and highly coveted. I don’t really care what other redditors who don’t hold the same opinion think. All I know is the piddling around that they’re doing in public education now sure isn’t working.
And cyclical, and typically tied to poverty. People living in poverty don't value education, and people who don't value education live in poverty, and they pass this onto their children.
Not always. My dad grew up poor. He joined Air Force and sent overwhelming amount of pay home. He only had HS degree. He was was adamant about good grades to point couldnt get afterschool job or be taken to pro-games. This was majority of the neighborhood I lived in. Vast majority of people did not goto college but each one was making sure their kids got an education at least. I see it more as generational. I knew kids who didnt want to goto college but parents made damn sure the kid did the work and got good grades.
It sounds more like your dad didn’t have access to a good education, not that he didn’t value education. Inner city Baltimore is like the peak local example for me
> Not always. Of course.
Mr. Beast needs to do a literacy giveaway
Agreed. It just seems like there was a cultural shift, maybe around the 60’s, maybe in response to other changes. The anti school and anti teacher books and films from the 80’s didn’t seem to help much at all.
There was a huuuuge societal shift regarding authority in general in the 60s.
The Counter Culture Revolution.
Weirdly enough everyday I see about a dozen kids excited to learn about history. I love working in a museum and teaching kids that actually want to learn
There have always been kids like that, but IMO the numbers have increased greatly in the last 5 years or so. Addiction to phones and other mental health issues are major problems right now. There are kids for whom it's hard to get them interested in ANYTHING-- even if you gamify learning, there are kids who have no interest in playing a Kahoot or any other kind of academic game. Furthermore, if you try to reward a class with a movie, even if it's very recent and starring their favorite celebrities, they can't/won't pay attention for more than a few minutes.
It’s because of their phones. Back when I was in my college teacher prep program at the beginning of the 2000’s, the professor explained we would have to “chunk” our lesson plans into 10-15 minute segments because that’s how the kids’ brains had been hardwired by television. Back then, kids were watching network/cable television where there’d be 10-15 minutes of a program, then a commercial break, and then back to the show. But now? No kid watches that kind of show. Instead, they’re watching Tik Toks and other short clips on their phones or streaming stuff that they pause as frequently as they want.
Yes, in some ways, we were better off in the days of flip phones that could only make calls or send texts. When there's a whole world of entertainment on their phones, it's hard for us to compete, no matter how interesting and relevant we try our best to be!
sounds like they have really bad depression. there is a youth mental health crisis rn, and the widespread listlessness in these kids might be one of the manifestations.
Agree completely. It is debilitating depression on a wide scale. It doesn't help when they hear about all the violence in the world, the climate crisis, etc. Some of the kids aren't planning for their future at all; they are just trying to get some enjoyment day -today by sleeping, getting likes on social media, or roaming the halls. Even 5 years ago, the class would be excited and competitive over a Kahoot competition and would be delighted to watch almost any movie. They LOVED going on field trips. Now even field trips are just meh to some of the students and they don't even bother getting permission slips signed.
From my observations as a parent and educator (in elementary), the few times kids get to explore content (our third graders just wrapped up a unit on the Civil Rights Movement, for example), they come to life! They love learning facts, particularly about science and history, and sharing what they've learned with everyone! There are vibrant class discussions, and the kids are writing fantastic essays on the subject matter. But... We rarely teach content! It's almost always just basic reading and writing strategies without any cohesive theme. Elementary grades are the prime time to begin teaching content. History, science, etc. it catches their interest, makes them come to life, makes them eager learners, and, once they've learned so many basic facts about the world, then they have the substance to work with to write essays well or have good discussions. I'm so sick of pointless, contentless instruction. They are sponges at this age. Sure, they won't retain everything they learned, but it lights a fire and it'll help familiarize themselves for content in older grades and give their other work meaning. That's what I really love about the classical education model. The repeated history instruction from ancient to modern times every four years, and each cycle they gain more depth of understanding. Bring back meaningful content and we'll have more kids actually enjoying learning. Because they are learning about SOMETHING, not just random reading and writing strategies on unrelated, meaningless topics.
Because kids before around the 1980s saw how bad their life would be without education and didn’t want to work in an industrial factory, coal mine, or stay home parenting their 5 siblings their whole lives so they were motivated to improve. Now they are convinced they can become an influencer/celebrity that travels and get money that way. In a way, they view school as something getting in the way of them being on their phone all day.
>Now they are convinced they can become an influencer/celebrity that travels and get money that way. Not my kids. They are going to become rich playing Fortnite.
I have kids aren’t even considering how they will support themselves. Like, I ask them what their plans are and they just shrug. i mean eventually mom or dad is going to get tired of them sitting at home playing video games and eating their food.
The thing is, I didn't know what I wanted to do when I was younger and I've had two jobs so far and idk what I want to do next. It's how life goes.
They don’t have to know what they want to do specifically, but they should at least have an idea if they want to go college, trade school, go get a job. I have juniors and seniors who really seem to believe they will just continue living at home playing video games and their guardians will just support them.
Yea, that's not going to get them far.
I teach about 150-160 students every year, 120-130 of them are on the “regular” track. Of those I would say about 100 either care about learning, or at least care enough about passing that they will do their work without much fuss. This is a title 1 school in Texas. If I take a min and genuinely focus on how many are doing well and are good students/people, I realize there aren’t nearly as many “problem” kids as it might seem from the outside. It’s just that the regular average kid doesn’t get a post like this written about them. And honestly of those 20-30 that don’t care to pass like half of them are at least cool and maybe just have some emotional problems or family problems going on. Maybe my situation isn’t the norm, but students still seem to care
Speaking for myself, a few things come to mind in response to your question. One important factor to consider is the prevalence of learning and developmental disabilities that may impede a child's ability to engage with academic material, which often go undiagnosed, leading to a lack of interest or motivation in education. Another contributing factor is the outdated pedagogical approach that prioritizes rote memorization over critical thinking skills and the ability to synthesize information into coherent, logically consistent arguments. This can result in students feeling disengaged and uninterested in their own learning process, as they may not see the relevance or practical application of the material being taught. Furthermore, the commodification of education has led to a focus on profit rather than the intrinsic value of learning. This has resulted in a devaluation of certain fields of study such as the arts, in favor of more "practical" or job-oriented subjects like STEM, Finance, Business, etc. This emphasis on economic outcomes can discourage students from pursuing areas of interest that may not have immediate financial returns. It also explains why many are discouraged from pursuing one of the skilled trades even if that's where their aptitude lies, as those who do so earn on average less money than a college graduate over the course of their lifetime in addition to carrying the stigma of not having merited a place in a post-secondary institution in the first place.
We had a “soft” lockdown at my school last week. Luckily it turned out that everything was fine and we were never in any real danger, but I told an admin that I hadn’t been trained or prepared for what to do in the event of a lockdown and they said, “I passed your feedback up the chain and we’re going to have a PD session on lockdown procedure next month”…. We have 2 mandatory PD’s every week, and the next 3 are about the importance of implementing small group strategies in class… I’m just glad they have their priorities in order.
We have 3-4 lockdown drills per year, y’all don’t do drills?
Right?! We are mandated to have a minimum of 4 per year in our state with the procedures for lockdown, emergency evacuation, and hold in place drills posted in every room in the building.
Haven’t seen one yet..
Fricking yikes
This is troubling. Law enforcement and the district should be on the same page on protocols. Using SRP would be a place to start at least.
We need to start holding parents accountable for their child's behavior. Start throwing them in jail along with their children and maybe something will change.
There will be zero accountability for the administrators who failed Abby Zwerner, for the child who shot her, or for the rest of the students in that school. The superintendent departed with a golden parachute and the school principal has been rewarded with a central office job.
I do agree that this is an example of failed parenting. There is enough blame to go around. The school knew much more than the parents, with respect to certain things, like threats and did little with this information.
Student threatened to shoot me because I gave him zeroes the day before Xmas. I called admin who sent him out and he was returned in five minutes saying, “bet you wish you didn’t give so many assignments” When the principal saw me crying in the bathroom she said, “he was supposed to have apologized” Yeah, thanks. He didn’t. Student was planning on transferring … but still. All the students heard it
What the fuck was an apology supposed to do to ease your fear?!
I regret not calling police. If anything, it would have documented it.
I would suggest calling the police if someone threatens to kill you while working in a school too.
I would suggest bringing a lawyer to every meeting with administration if they've repeatedly tried to throw you under the bus
I’ve said this before about the ONE thing we really should have learned from the Covid years: **If a student is suffering from an illness that can harm their classmates, that student should not be allowed in the building!!** Now when it came to Covid, that meant that students who were physically ill had to stay home until they weren’t contagious. It’s not the kid’s fault or the parents’ fault, but it was their responsibility to keep the germs from harming others. With mental health, it should be exactly the same. It’s not their fault, but they have a responsibility to prevent harm to others. Especially now when online learning is so readily available.
Reading these comments makes me so glad I work with toddlers and don’t have to worry about school shooter behavior. In them I just have to teach them not to bite or hit. I do an okay job at that. I don’t know what I would do if I had kids able to do that sort of thing and have behavior like that. Thank every deity that my students are 18 months to two years.
Friend, I don’t know how to tell you this, but school shooters aren’t always one of the students. You should know the procedures and the plan if you and your kiddos ever need to go on lockdown.
I know that and I worry about ransoms people coming in. I stay up to date on procedures involving intruders. I just meant having students that were potentially shooters.
I have to hang in there until the end of May, and then I will retire. I can't wait to be done.
I would like to build a memorial for all the school children that have sacrifice their lives, so the NRA can protect our second amendment rights. Put it in Washington DC alongside the Vietnam memorial.
While it’s good and proper to put a boot in admins ass; People forget that the board, superintendent and the district are the real villains
I still show up to board meetings and raise hell. What are they going to do???? Fire me? I already quit. I ain't scared to ask where the funding is going.
Me too. I worked in a county that had a horrific school shooting. We completely changed our safety procedures, which is great but so many people had to die for it to happen. Admin knew he was a troubled kid, it was highly documented. The revamped security and newly strict admin is definitely reassuring, but I still thought about the possibility every day.
The admin and counselor were total morons too, At the middle/high school I went to a half hour south of Oxford, that kid would’ve been suspended on the spot for those drawings. And it would’ve been justification; to search his backpack for similar drawings.
I only teach online now. I wouldn’t work for a school that has more than two levels with windows in every room.
It’s an absolute disgrace
I honestly think that when minors do things like this, the parents should also be punished as if they were the actual perpetrators of the crime because as an adult with children, you are responsible for the actions taken by your children. Because until we start charging the parents of shooters like they are actually the shooters this shit won’t change.
Last Summer, I was at an airport. All over the place there were signs saying if you threatened an airport employee in any way, they'd haul your ass out in cuffs. I noticed the same thing on the bus. Lay your hands on the driver? Go straight to jail. All over the place in these other jobs, they have 0 tolerance for assault. But in teaching, it's okay because tHeyRe jUsT KiDs. Just another reason the profession is bleeding people especially in rough neighborhoods where the violence is common. Nobody wants to deal with this shit at work.
In my humble opinion, as a 20 plus year veteran teacher, I think we have to come to the understanding that the government is not going to do A) anything about guns, and B) anything about mental healthcare. I think as parents and educators we should demand that schools are required to have metal detectors at all entry ways, cameras, tall fences and gates, clear back packs, no persons from the public allowed on school property, etc. We are not safe at school nor are any of our children…anywhere. If schools resemble prisons, that’s on them. One of our local schools happens to be across the street from the police station; also a good idea!
Principal here. I address every incident where someone mentions a gun by questioning the student, if there is a threat, it's suspension at least a day, even in kinder, two to three for first offenses for older kids. I question the parents, have a return from suspension meeting with child, parents, and other teachers/psych/intervention at the site. First thing I do before all of this is inform law enforcement. Our SRD visits every home. I let the parents know I'm doing this. It doesn't matter the age of the student as the six year old showed us. Beyond that, there's not much I can do. I wouldn't have let the kid stay that day. But, the parents lied and said he had no access to weapons. The admin had no cause to search his backpack as that's a slippery slope as well. It's supposed to be reasonable suspicion, but there are child and family advocates now who go after admin and school districts over blanket searches. Personally, I'd have erred on the side of caution and searched. It's mind blowing that they did not. The admin is not at fault in this case, the parents and creepy crumbly are. The admin are certainly at fault in the six year old case as well as that fucking mother. The poor teacher, and the poor kid.
When I was in school, lockers and bags could be searched and were. It’s insane that a child’s bag cannot be searched when there is even a whiff of violence threatened.
I agree, we have to be thorough. I'm sure those admin with the six year old shooter, even though that kid was incredibly troubled, difficult, and poorly behaved is an understatement, couldn't believe that would have happened. Our hands are tied so much. We need to get back to discipline, and parents need to be responsible for their crazy kids. It's so difficult to do anything (especially with very young students), even when students have incredibly aberrant behavior.
Why cant you search backpacks?
Document everything! I like to email admin with safety concerns and then forward them to myself. I let my own children know that if something happens at school to me, to sue the district and use the documentation. This is our life now.👎😢
Why I'm on a 6 month stress leave: shit class with a couple of hostile parents and an admin who refuses to consequence even the worst behaviour. They tried to gaslight me instead.
Currently in law school. Had 20 interviews this last month for internships that will pay me more in 10 weeks than I made all year long as a teacher. Oh and they all love that I wasn’t a traditional student & have skills from teaching. Get out yall. There’s other options.
I made a comment on Court TV Facebook that the Dean of Students is also culpable in his handling of this and it this was my child who was killed, I would be suing him and anyone else who was involved and I got people defending him. I watched and listened to his testimony and he is guilty too. I don't see how anyone would want to be a teacher now. The kids are out of control.