Addressing Violence in Schools

BY STEVE NUZUM

During my last year as a teacher alone, several students became physically aggressive towards me. 

I won’t describe those incidents in detail here, in order to protect these student’s privacy, but in at least two cases, the students’ actions would have met the legal definition of assault if they were adults and not at school. Close friends and family who worked in schools have also reported being assaulted by students, touched inappropriately by students, and threatened by students.

These incidents, or course, were not representative of most of my experiences with students.

Most students I taught-- including the students I mentioned above-- were, by and large, well-behaved kids who respected their peers and the adults in the school building. These incidents, I believe, came to a head most often because a student was under a great deal of stress-- whether from school issues, problems at home, or interpersonal relationship drama-- and didn’t have access to healthy strategies for dealing with that stress. 

On the other hand, these events have to be understood in the broader context of school violence, and efforts to address it.

During the previous year, at the same school, one student stabbed another in an altercation in the hallway. (I didn’t witness that one, or teach the students, but the school was placed on lockdown and local news covered the incident.) 

The year before that, in part as a response to a large number of reported incidents in which students brought guns and other weapons onto school campuses, the school had installed a metal detector. (Existing research often contradicts the understandable belief that metal detectors significantly cut down on violence in schools.) 

Although these incidents weren’t the main reason I left teaching, they certainly helped me make up my mind that maybe the job had become too stressful. (Still, most of the stress did not come from students at all, but from the larger policy trends in South Carolina toward villanizing educators, empowering the loudest “parental rights” voices, and censoring history, current events, and books that help all students feel included in school.) 

Recent discussions-- often well-meaning-- in the SC General Assembly, have brought these incidents, along with many others I experienced or saw during my sixteen years in SC public schools, back into the front of my mind.

Although it’s often overstated, both for political impact and out of real concern for vulnerable children, violence in schools is obviously a real and significant issue.  

According to a recent brief from the American Psychological Association,  “National [educator] survey data reveal high rates of verbal/threatening (e.g., verbal attacks, verbal threats, sexual harassment, intimidation, public humiliation, bullying) and physical violence (e.g., objects thrown, objects used as weapons, physical attacks) against educators and school personnel from students, parents, colleagues, and administrators. Rates were initially high, lowered during the pandemic, and surged back to pre-pandemic or higher levels once in-person teaching resumed. Teachers experienced the greatest increase in violence after the pandemic, compared to other roles, and the highest rates of violence from students; whereas, administrators reported the highest rates of violence from parents.” 

Based on the research, and on years of discussions with educators from across the state, I believe most teachers have been threatened either overtly or implicitly with violence at some point. 

I have also witnessed school staff members and School Resource Officers use what I considered to be excessive physical force on students.  

I once worked across the hallway from a teacher who was caught on camera in a fistfight with a student. 

I worked in a school district where an SRO threw a student to the floor and dragged her across a classroom because she would not get out of her seat. (He was fired after an investigation from the Sheriff’s Office found that he had not followed his training in applying force.) 

In another district years earlier, I was a few feet away as an SRO pepper-sprayed a teenager in the face-- unintentionally filling the hallway with pepper spray and impacting dozens of other students who were transitioning to class-- for reasons that weren’t ever clear to me. Officers then handcuffed the student and left him sitting in a courtyard until after the other students on the scene had dispersed. 

These incidents show how difficult (some would argue impossible) it is to broadly use “force” to make schools safer. 

Recent legislation proposed in South Carolina allows school staff to use “reasonable physical force”. 

The term is left only vaguely defined across three House and Senate bills introduced in the past few weeks (at the tail end of the legislative session): “‘Reasonable physical force’ means the minimum amount of force necessary for an educator to protect himself, others, or personal or school property from harm in response to violent student behavior.” (Emphasis mine.) 

What is “reasonable physical force” when it comes to an educator or other school employee dealing with student misbehavior? 

I think that’s a question that the General Assembly really should have wrestled with long and hard before fast-tracking legislation empowering school staff to use it (and before the House inserted the same language again, with only days to go in the legislative session, into an unrelated bill, Senate Bill 416, which was actually supposed to help ensure that students accused of serious offenses do not lose their due process rights before being expelled from school). 

As countless high-profile uses of law enforcement “force” (many of them deadly) have demonstrated, America does not have a clear standard, either legally or morally, when it comes to the use of force. What is excessive to one person may be acceptable to another. (Even the why of force has been constantly debated: is it acceptable to use violence to protect property? To punish dissent? To enforce civil laws? To establish law enforcement authority?)   

While there may be rare occasions where the average teacher or other school staff members need to physically redirect students, creating a sweeping power to do so for such a broad range of incidents-- including potential damage to school property-- opens up several cans of worms, legally, ethically, and practically.  

That’s probably why, even though South Carolina law actually allows schools to use some forms of corporal punishment, every school district in the state has passed their own policies to ban it. This is probably because districts realize that with the use of force, “reasonable” or not, comes not only a greater risk of lawsuits from parents, but a greater risk that students are harmed, and that altercations with other students or with staff are escalated. 

It also seems obvious that the “solution” of allowing students to use “reasonable force” is nothing but an admission that the state is not willing to actually provide teachers any assistance.  Essentially, teachers complaining about student misbehavior and violence are being told, We’ll look the other way while you sort it out yourself. 

Weapons don’t end up on school campuses because teachers aren’t fighting students enough, they end up on campus because they are prevalent and too often left unsecured. There are many potential solutions that could prevent them from showing up on campus; using force and expulsion after the fact isn’t one of those solutions, because children who are bringing guns and knives to school are very likely not capable of thinking ahead to understand the consequences of their actions. 

And while student violence toward teachers and staff and other students is unacceptable,  meeting it with more force (force that may very well be violent) is unlikely to make schools safer. 

Smaller classes make schools safer, and make misbehavior easier to deal with. Having more staff throughout the school makes school safer, because more adults are present to de-escalate and handle misbehavior. Better training for school staff on how to deal with conflict with students in healthy ways makes school safer, because it gives us tools to de-escalate tense situations.  Research- backed strategies for preventing violence and helping students express themselves in ways other than misbehavior make students safer, because they address root causes of violence and other misbehavior. 

Other potential solutions may be less obvious 

For example, some research suggests that schools which focus heavily on metrics like test scores may actually increase the likelihood that students commit violent infractions against school staff. In contrast, “When policies allow teachers to create opportunities for students to deeply engage with academic tasks (i.e., a mastery goal structure), students may be less likely to pursue acts of violence.” 

I think this is a find that deserves a lot more discussion and investigation. It doesn’t surprise me that a test-obsessed school culture doesn’t address real human problems, but if it is doing so much harm as to make schools less safe, it is all the more reason to rethink our fixation on metrics that tell us little about what, of value, students are actually gaining from school. 

Encouraging educators and other staff to “handle it themselves” is, at best, security theatre. 

Just as metal detectors do more to make the public feel  like they decrease violence than they actually decrease violence, a “reasonable force” law is likely going to do very little to diminish violence, and may actually drive incidents up, while persuading a part of the public that the problem has been addressed. 

And to put it bluntly, every time a student wanted to fight me, the knowledge that I might fight back would have just put us both at greater risk. While I never simply allowed a student to attack me, in my experience there was always a better way to defend myself than by escalating the amount of force. Laying hands on a student almost never de-escalated the situation and was, at best, a last resort that only addressed the most immediate danger.

Unfortunately, almost everything I learned about dealing with these tense situations was a result of a decade-and-a-half of trial and error. When I was in the classroom, I would have begged anyone suggesting they were protecting my “right” to use “reasonable force” against my kids to instead invest in training that would actually help me avoid the need to ever consider using it. I would have begged them to decrease (usually test-related) paperwork so that administrators had time to actually come to my class to help deal with particularly problematic situations. I would have begged for more caring adults in the school building to work with kids to help figure out why they were acting out.

But the fact that we’re even having this conversation, to me, means we have lost the plot. I do not believe that students are fundamentally more dangerous than they were in the past. Some data suggests that, overall, violence in schools has declined significantly since the 1990s (although post-pandemic violence and misbehavior may be up-- hopefully temporarily). But even if we are seeing a sustained uptick in student violence, I don’t think bringing back harsher punishments and adding more physical force to educator’s repertoires is likely to help. 

Past research has shown that “zero tolerance” approaches (such as increasing suspension rates) don’t actually prevent future misbehavior, and may be associated with increased behavior problems. 

My hunch is that this association comes from a similar place as the association with test-focused schools and misbehavior: the best way to get kids to buy into school, to cooperate with school staff, and to learn to deal with strong negative emotions in a healthy way, might be to model those things for them, to present them with trustworthy adults who are more interested in helping them than in punishing them.