You’re right - I don’t. That’s why I’ve been asking for someone to clarify things.
I’ve never seen that, in ten years of teaching. Never even heard of it. I suppose it’s possible that a student could claim assault at the mere touch of a teacher. But there’s also the fact that (or so I was led to believe in training) teachers act in loco parentis. They have a duty to prevent harm, and could plausibly claim they needed to take a kid by the hand as they led him away from trouble.
But you seem to be saying that school and/or board policy could override that in some manner.
So again, I ask: Cite?
To anyone who can provide an authoritative point of view I ask, what are the real legal do’s and don’ts? I’d be grateful to hear examples from any state if someone can provide it. This thread has made me realize that throughout my career I heard a lot of guidelines, but nobody has ever told me there’s a clearly demarcated line that cannot be crossed. It always seemed to come down to teachers using their judgement.
spazattak, earlier you said “Our teachers are trained on what they can do - and that is that they can’t touch a student. Period.” I’ve never heard of such a policy. I don’t see how it’s feasible, especially at the elementary level. Can you give some more details?
When you think about it, children have to opt IN to accepting any discipline now. Teachers have no real power other to suggest (politely) the child go to the principal. Lather rinse and repeat until (pun alert) the behavior is arrested.
Hah.* Send to the principal*. Principals here are admins that have little to do with day to day academics or behavior. They get 10-30k in bonuses when students test well, though. :rolleyes:
In most metro schools, they’re sent to a dean or behavior person for discipline. Teachers in Denver have to make sure that they are redirecting the child three times before he’s sent out. Fucking shit. That takes up 30 per cent of my teaching time. IMHO, you wanna disrupt my class, go take a hike. Then when I finally have justification for sending a child out, a security guard comes and escorts the child to an office or place where he can be a prick and miss out on school. Then the child is back again.
Kids are missing out in inner city schools because of other kids’ behavior.
We also had 2 officers on campus…they did the arresting for theft, drugs, violence, sexual assault.
I think there’s a point here. If we could beat employees they would be more productive. Also the politicians, a little negative reinforcement will make them rethink selling out their constituents. Oh and women and you-know-whos too. We could really get this world running right again if we could just beat people again.
Teachers have to provide serious justification in public school settings (outside of sped…another issue). Most teachers back off from it. I’ve seen a few holds.
Usually there’s some kind of school policy or waiver, but it doesn’t stop lawsuits. Or apprehending of teachers who place ‘hands on’ a violent student.
Serious injuries from restraint are usually a case of ‘mentally disabled child restrained improperly’. If you restrain a child correctly, the chances of serious injury are so, so low.
disclaimer: I’ve done at least 200 restraints on kids >11. I wouldn’t touch an older kid…911, plz.
Legal dos and dont’s vary by state, but there are plenty of books to guide you so that you don’t get sued.
My district school didn’t want teachers performing any kind of CPR or First Aid in case they get sued. I stepped in when no one else would once. The teachers were grateful, but worried I could get into trouble. I said if the principal wanted to say something, he could talk to the foster parents to see if they had problem with it. He didn’t say anything to me. He didn’t say thanks, either…probably gave the school nurse (who took 10 minutes to arrive from upstairs) the credit for doing nothing. Who knows.
DPS IS told to keep hands off. No hugging (not even the side variety) unless you want to run the risk of sexual assault charges, no excessive shaking hands (high fives are OK), no restraining (unless you HAVE to and other adults back you up), no developing close relationships (in fear of sex, I suppose), give out personal info at your own risk, do not move an injured child even when the child displays difficulty breathing, let seizing kids bang their heads on concrete until the nurse comes… okay the last two aren’t set a set rule, but suggested.
My legal/education course opened my eyes SUPER WIDE to all the things teachers can get into trouble for. When I was in HS, I got a ride home when my car broke down and my mom worked 2nd shift. Today? That’s a no-no. We had a kid pass away at our school and the kids wanted rides to the funeral and we couldn’t help out.
Teachers are expected to be kind and caring and reach out to help students achieve their potential, but in reality, we’re supposed to be unemotional shrinks that magically transport academic knowledge by sheer will and mountains of paperwork. Ban Restraining Students? (from 09)
Allegation a crime does not make.
If a kid starts throwing shit in a hospital, hell yeah they’ll be restrained!
I don’t support locked time out rooms, though. I quit a job over that. It was a SPED school for co-morbid disorders – kids with low IQs that had a psych disorder. I restrained kids when I had to, and sometimes I wonder if some were unnecessary. (I always followed the IEP - and there is no room for subjectivity in that…well, OK, I handled situations without restraint if a supervisor wasn’t near. If I didn’t, I could be fired/faced charges.)
Staff was constantly getting injured…fractured nose, black eye, bruises, slapped faces, pulled hair, shin injuries :mad::mad::mad:. The tetanus shots, the Hep B shots…:dubious:
Abuse is higher in SPED placements. Deaf & Blind schools suffer from high sexual assault and rape cases and SPED schools are nearly unchecked because “they take the unwanted”.
In SPED situations, it’s easy for a teacher to get so frustrated that they want to smack a kid after the kid just chucked a computer. But when we’re talking about day to day classrooms, this isn’t the case. Teachers are expected to handle violent and disruptive students INSIDE the classroom. If they send a kid out, it’s reported and the school looks bad. So teachers can’t teach. That’s on the students and the schools. Not teachers.
Violent children are unreasonable. They shouldn’t be in school. First time, call the police, that’s what you do when people become violent. Until remedial actions have been taken, don’t let them back in school, or around anybody for that matter. It’s not the teacher’s fault, or even the administrator’s fault. It’s the fault of idiots who allow violent children in schools, and the parents of the violent children (in most cases).
She’s speaking of kids with severe special education requirements. The problems with these kids can be . . .complicated. We have a room for severely autistic kids and we have had a few incidents over the years. There are lots and lots of things you can do to limit the chances of these kids hurting themselves or others, but it’s never going to be 100% safe.
That said, as far as general ed goes, I’ve been a high school classroom teacher and I’ve never been told to never touch a student. I hug my kids on suitable occasions (first day of school, graduation, big news) and I do things like tap them on the shoulder to redirect. I’m not a super-touchy person in general, but I don’t especially avoid touching students. But, my school has always had a culture that encouraged pretty tight relationships between faculty and students. Plenty of people give kids rides places, that sort of thing. All my kids have my phone number and call/text when they have questions. The norms for these things vary widely.
But discipline is a problem, and it does fall back on the teacher. I find the idea that somehow teachers are being forced to outsource discipline hilarious. We are supposed to handle it all ourselves, and if there are problems, it’s seen as a sign of bad teaching. I’ve been told, with a straight face, that kids don’t misbehave if the lesson is interesting and relevant enough.
The number one problem is a lack of effective consequences. You can’t dock grades for behavior, even indirectly. You can assign detention, but if the kid doesn’t show, all you can do is put them in in-school suspension, which they kind of like. If you make that a miserable enough experience that they don’t want to go, they just stop coming to school, and then you have to turn that over to the truancy people. If the parents don’t back your play, you can’t do much.
It ends up coming down to strength of personality. The problem is that a lot of potentially great teachers get run off before they learn the knack of it.
I don’t think that should be the cause of major problems. Mainstreaming may go too far in some cases, but the occasional problem from children with special requirements can be handled through trained personnel, up to the point of recurring problems. Then everybody else’s right to feel safe, and to be able to enjoy a productive education should be the important factors.
That is the problem, and it shouldn’t be the teachers responsibility. It should be the parents responsibility to have their children prepared to go to school and not disrupt others. I know we are talking about children here, and teachers have to exercise some level of control through various means. But certainly when it reaches the level of violence, and I think well before that in the level of disruption, teachers shouldn’t be responsible for providing a solution. Send the kid home. If nothing can be done to prevent future problems, don’t let him back in school. Give the kid an internet connection and let him work from home, or in a cage if need be (as a hyperbolic example).
The sad part is for every student where the cops are called in as an overreaction, I could point out 100 cases where a student should be arrested but it is handled in house and things don’t get any better. How many times should a student start a fight before he gets arrested? Or grabbing girls sexually over and over before being arrested? Or threatening teachers before being arrested?
I’m talking about kids who are functionally 200 lbs toddlers with some really weird tantrum triggers. They can’t possibly be mainstreamed, and wouldn’t know it if they were. There is no way for the people to work with them to ever feel 100% safe, though training and good common sense make a huge difference. Short of abandoning these kids in a cell and throwing in food occasionally, someone is going to have to accept a certain amount of risk to work with them.
Ok, but that’s not the general classroom situation at all. And most teachers don’t have the training to deal with that situation, and shouldn’t be in it. Teachers in mainstream classrooms are in danger now from children who suffer no consequences for their actions. If a child is out of control, and disrupting a classroom, and needs to by physically restrained or removed, someone trained and authorized to conduct such actions is required. In a school lacking anyone so specifically trained or authorized, calling the police is the proper recourse.
Yeah, it’s a shame that they are a bottleneck on the gteneral success of our education system. As I said upthread, this small % of students spoil it for the rest of the kids, because they command so much attention of the teachers that they don’t have time to be effective at teaching the other 99% of the students.
Yeah. If I were a schoolteacher (I’m not) I’d be frightened to handle a misbehaving girl alone, and would probably want an attorney on the phone with me to coach me through acceptable behavior.
Me: “She’s screaming again! Can I grab her wrists?”
Attorney: “Yes, but remember that if she struggles, you need to keep your hands clearly away from her chest or groin. I recommend staying with the arms and legs unless you want to defend yourself from molestation charges”
Yeah. I was talking about two situations: One in a SPED environment.
One in a metro school.
In the metro school, discipline took up a huge chunk of time (depending on the class). And I had what I consider “good kids” for Denver. I’m a great teacher, but I am so sick and fn tired of being told that if I’m ‘creative enough’, then I can handle 40 kids, 20 books, no supplies, kids who can’t read or speak English well [disclaimer: I was in ESL and I love ESL] and gang problems while raising test scores, getting enough sleep, working 70 hours a week (20 over contract) + making 33k.
That shit is on admin, school boards, and the state. And the kids!
You can’t grab wrists. If she’s chucking stuff, you could probably avoid a lawsuit if you held her in straightjacket fashion and notified her parents and DPS right away.
Probably.
You can’t put hands on a child unless you’re stopping someone from getting hurt or hurting themselves. They can scream MOTHERFUCKCOCKYOU for ten minutes and you have no recourse but to hope that someone in admin or security can handle it. They won’t do hands-on, either. In my old school, we had campus cops…fights usually happened outside, though. Sometimes in class, but, yeah.
Nooo…I was talking about regular metro area classrooms.
Denver, Chicago, DC, Detroit, LA, Phoenix…Denver is mild compared to those, but we still only have like a 50-55 per cent grad rate (depends on how you bend the numbers). 75 per cent of Hispanic kids in Denver won’t graduate high school.
They now include summer school and the fifth year high schooler.
When I was in school, my teachers never received any certification or training. Well, maybe the training consisted of, “You see that giant wooden board over there? If the kids give you any trouble, you just smack them in the ass with it until they stop.” They didn’t get a certificate when training was over.
States can control this. Even without bringing back corporal punishment, they can pass laws that absolve school employees from any criminal or civil liability for force against children. Of course, they can make an exception if the force is reckless, wanton, or grossly excessive.
The reason why kids are free to misbehave? The KNOW that the teacher can’t do anything to them. That didn’t happen when I was in school. Hell, you were even scared of the old ladies, because they would get the football coach to blister your ass if you messed up.
We reap what we sow. We have decided that it is cruel and barbaric to paddle children. With that comes the perception that kids now don’t have respect for authority and don’t see that ultimate consequence to their actions.
I stepped in when no one else would once. The teachers were grateful, but worried I could get into trouble. I said if the principal wanted to say something, he could talk to the foster parents to see if they had problem with it. 
He didn’t say anything to me. He didn’t say thanks, either…probably gave the school nurse (who took 10 minutes to arrive from upstairs) the credit for doing nothing. Who knows.