Parents and lawmakers, we need your help. There is a growing crisis in our Utah schools. Extreme misbehavior from students is growing and increasing exponentially.
Coupled with this, is an increasing number of apathetic parents who are ghosting their schools, leaving it to teachers and administrators to deal with the problems.
Bullying has returned to the schools. Ask your students if this is not true. There are young students who frequently throw violent and uncontrollable temper tantrums in the hallways, in the classrooms, on the playgrounds, often destroying school property and equipment.
Teachers now have to evacuate the other students of the classroom in order to let the one misbehaving student go through their bout of distress until they are calm again. This greatly puts a strain on the mental and emotional stability of everyone in the room, not to mention halting the learning process these kids should be enjoying.
Unfortunately, many of the tools and resources needed by our educators to restore safety and productivity to the classrooms have been stripped these past few years or never existed in the first place. Some of the more recent removals include the teachers ability to reasonably restrain an unruly student in order to prevent property damage or to even physically remove them from the classroom.
Principals once had some parental rights over students at the schools and police departments once had jurisdiction over matters of bullying, drugs, fighting, etc. All of which is now gone. If this was done because of the actions of a few misguided individuals then we have inadvertently doomed a greater number of students and school personnel to a tougher school environment.
Dealing with poor behavior is not new to teachers and education either. Since the dawn of time, when the first cave teachers chiseled out the first textbooks for cave students to learn to read, and one of them instead threw it against the cave wall, teachers have been dealing with bad behavior.
The problem is that extreme behavior issues have taken a leap forward and grown rampantly in the past few years alone. And like a new strain of the flu virus, they have grown immune to our countermeasures which, I might add, have not kept up with these more difficult situations, or due to our schools being stripped of previously useful and effective methods of maintaining safety and order in the classrooms, have contributed to the increased growth.
We need better medicine, as it were, to heal the wounds our schools are feeling. Our children deserve better. They deserve safety and wholesome learning environments. They deserve peace of mind when they walk our school halls and step into our school classrooms.
Parents, write to you your local representatives. Ask them to help our schools combat the behavior issues. Ask them to listen to what the teachers and their associations are recommending in order to restore our schools to what they are intended to be, institutions for learning, curiosity, innovation and more.
Daniel Greene
Daniel Greene, M.Ed., North Logan, has taught in the Cache School District for 13 years.