In the comments section of yesterday’s post about teacher immunity, Katie was kind enough to point out that the bill being discussed in the article was HB 1462. As it pertains to immunity, the bills says:
In all matters relating to the discipline and conduct of students, school corporation personnel . . . have qualified immunity with respect to a disciplinary action taken to promote student conduct under subdivision (2) if the action is taken in good faith and is reasonable.
By my reading, this immunity provision is essentially worthless. A teacher’s immunity for disciplining a child hinges on an assessment that the discipline was “reasonable.” To me, that looks an awful lot like a basic negligence standard.
School discipline was also the subject of an article by Bill Engle of the Richmond Palladium-Item.
Richmond Community Schools board member Linda Morgason believes that one way school officials can raise student achievement in the classroom is to support teachers by giving them other methods for removing disruptive students.
It’s a tough problem. One or two disruptive students can have a huge impact on the rest of the class — encouraging the rest of the crowd to be disruptive itself or, at least, taking a disproportionate amount of the teacher’s resources. What do you do? Throw the kid out? Obviously you need to reach out to the parents, but that has its own challenges. Some parents are too overworked and overwhelmed to do much of anything, other parents simply aren’t good parents and are not inclined to do much of anything to correct their children. Engaged and energetic parents can sometimes exacerbate the problem — disbelieving that *their* child could be part of the problem and responding by attacking the school.
School administrators, from what I hear, often aren’t terribly good at backing up teachers in such situations; caving to the pressure of the parents and leaving the teacher feeling like it’s pointless to even try. (And, sometimes, frankly, the teacher is the problem, making it tough to commit to backing up the teacher in all circumstances.)
I’m glad I’m a blogger – it’s a lot easier to identify problems than to actually fix them.
There are school corporations in Indiana that prohibit corporal punishment but not all of them do, that’s my concern. Hitting kids is so counterproductive; it would have been pertinent to this bill to fix that archaic f/law. And you’re right, Doug, it is a lot easier to identify problems than it is to fix them…
I think using technology may be one way to go here. Cameras in every classroom being monitor by security (if warranted) with every school having the ability to assign problem students to in-school virtual education rooms. Though I suppose that falls under the lot easier said then done category.
Well, again, who is it who’s identified a problem? Are teachers in Richmond currently unable to remove disruptive students from their classrooms? I’d say a) bosh and b) if there’s some tiny truth to that then the first course of action would be to install a school administration that knows what it’s doing.
But mostly a).
This is more of that Daniels/Zoeller/Bennett three-way from last years’ eleven-month campaign season: “I’ll give teachers the tools they need to maintain discipline!” “And I’ll see to it they’re backed up in court!” I mean, where was the problem, exactly? Were teachers going to prison for issuing detention slips, while Steve Carter shrugged? Do they need plenary power, or sidearms? How ’bout waterboarding? Seems like at that point your problem goes beyond what teachers are capable of. As you say, Doug, basic negligence. There will always be limits, praise the Lord, and there’ll always be the right of appeal, unless Richmond wants to go ahead and ship its entire student body to Gitmo, cutting out the middleman.
Being of an age where as a student and as a teacher I remember the days of a great deal of freedom on discipline. Several points come to mind: parents were almost all supportive and often told a student they would get twice the punishment of any at school; there were injustices which mainly involved individuals; teachers generally knew that the principal (and other school administration) would support them when it came to disruptive students not being allowed to interfer with the rights and well being of others (students and teacher). Now, the situation is quite different with parents often showing extreme disrepect for the authorative figure of the teacher or principal; individual student rights trump about everything including the right of other students for a safe learning environment; and there is wonderment as to why some very capable very dedicated teachers give up. Hmm wonder if there is correlation.
I was part of the ‘if you get your butt whupped at school, you have a butt-whupping at home to look forward to’ cohort.
Thinking back, I also remember a succession of teachers that deserved this kind of backing (until running into a well-known jerk in junior high school – but I had learned a bit about gaming the system by then, so he was no problem).
I don’t know what the rules are now, but when I was a substitute teacher in Richmond back in the 1990’s I was not allowed to have an extremely disruptive student (who was also an emancipated minor) removed from the classroom. It was a long-term sub job, and I ended up quitting, because none of the school administrators would do anything about the student. The teacher I was subbing for had been allowed to take a handful of his best students to Japan for a couple of weeks while school was in session. The kids who were left behind were mainly what would politely be called slackers. Most of them weren’t that bad, as I’d dealt with them in other subbing situations. The emancipated minor was a complete jerk who constantly got the other kids riled up, however. The school refused to do anything about the situation, so I did what I needed to do for my safety and sanity, which was leave. I hated doing that, but I really felt that I had no other sane choice.
Things were getting so bad for subs at RHS at the time, that the personnel office called a meeting to try to show us how to deal with problem situations and students. The suggestions we were given were ludicrous. One of my colleagues speculated that the real reason for the meetings was to keep the subs from unionizing, as had happened in some school systems. None of us wanted to dole out corporal punishement, but we did want support from the school administration for other disciplinary measures–within reason, of course.