Sen. Spartz has introduced SB 261 entitled “school deregulation” which makes discretionary a number of mandatory training provisions imposed on schools and teachers by the State. In particular:
- 1. Recurrent training on alternatives to restraint and seclusion.
- 2. Bullying prevention training.
- 3. Criminal awareness programs and school employee training.
- 4. Training on child abuse and neglect.
- 5. Suicide awareness and prevention training.
- 6. Human trafficking identification and reporting.
- 7. Seizure recognition and response training.
None of these are bad things. They all seem very valuable. None are frivolous. However, this sort of thing adds up. Schools have only so many resources and teachers have only so many hours in the day. Decisions about education policy are usually best the closer they get to the classroom. This legislation would allow local schools to decide what type of training is necessary, beneficial, and within their means.
I took the suicide awareness training as part of working towards my alternative teacher certification. It was online and only took a couple of hours. If any training should be mandatory, it’s that one.
One big problem is that you can’t predict when/if you will need that training, but when/if you do, you will definitely need it and with some of these issues (such as suicide awareness), you can’t say, “Hold it there. I need some training in this”. Some of these problems can be life or death events. There are some attorneys on this site, so they would be most aware of the problems if a school district has skipped one of these issues and someone is hurt or dies because an employee has not responded appropriately because he/she has not received training. With so many public school kids, many of whom are vulnerable, the chances of that happening increase.