Last week, a substitute teacher was arrested after a video went viral of him hitting and fighting a student in a school here in Vegas.
The video immediately started a chain of people weighing in on kids, parenting, education, teaching and a host of other topics. This is not a story that has a clear cut bad guy or good guy, although there is a lot of imperfection. It’s wrapped up in the complexities of our humanness, our broken educational system, our hurting families, our struggling communities, our kids who are on the edges.
Check out the video:
We know that the student is 18 years old, so he is officially an adult in Nevada.
The teacher, a long-term substitute and coach, and the student were walking up a ramp during a passing period. The student started the fight by calling the teacher the N word. The student reportedly grabbed his teacher’s shirt and threw some slaps at him. I have no idea how this escalated or what reasons the student had for initiating the interaction, but somewhere in the middle of defending himself the teacher loses control and starts fighting the student.
The teacher throws punches, clearly going at him until the student falls down on the floor. The teacher says to the student while he is down: “You lost your mind, boy.” The student replies: “You’re going to jail, N-word” and then the teacher slaps him in the face.
The kids crowd around and separate the two. The students clearly are protecting the student from further violence, but there was also word that some of the students formed a GoFundme (now removed) for this teacher, so we know there is a larger story here about who this teacher is and who this student is, and who they were on that particular day, and why everything went down this way.
Of course, the public has taken sides across all kinds of social media. And a lot of it is ridiculous and inappropriate. I am continually freaked out by people who believe if a kid gets a good ass-whoopin’, it will solve everything.
But this is where we are.
When I write about these issues I have to consider that I am a mom of a kid (13) who has thrown punches in school, fought his way through life, and I’m sure has let loose some venomous words on other people.
But we have the ability to pull our kid out of school and provide an education for him with a tutor at home. We have the ability to do a lot of research and join groups and seek out a treatment team that is responsive to his early life trauma. We can afford to go out of network for certain services. Not everyone can know what’s truly happening with their kids, or have the time, energy and resources to take that all on because, you know, they have rent to pay and groceries to buy and life to manage and jobs to do. Shit, it’s a huge juggling act for us and David and I are able to mostly work from home.
So I am empathic about kids who have underlying issues and do dumb shit. And I do not believe that threatening expulsion and ass whoopings will do anything. But I have to set up our lived experience against the violence in our schools that threatens our children and teachers.
Here are just some issues from Clark County schools THIS YEAR. (CCSD is the 5th largest school district in the nation. It’s a behemoth.) I suspect many school districts around the country have similar reports (I’m sure this isn’t a complete list):
Clark County School District police have responded dozens of times to acts of violence at a south valley high school. Students were arrested and a teenager filed a lawsuit claiming he was violently beaten.
A 5-year-old recently told a teacher they wanted to stab her and watch her bleed out.
An educator attempted to break up a fight, but was pushed away violently by a parent as some students cheered and filmed the incident. The video was later posted on Instagram.
One teacher has 36 students in her classroom and seven of them have “excessive, habitually disruptive behaviors.” There is no support staff in the room with her.
A teacher reports having a student who fights with peers every day, yells and uses her Chromebook laptop computer as a weapon.
An educator had to have her spine fused after being assaulted by a student.
A pregnant educator was punched in the stomach by a fourth grader.
Another was kicked in the groin, given a broken wrist and was punched in the eye.
Children are also being injured by classmates, often as a way to video a fight and post it across social media. Several accounts post nothing but local school fights.
In 2023, 4 students were charged as adults with murder after beating to death a fellow student.
And then this doozy: A student brutalizes and abuses a teacher for nearly an hour back in 2022.
The teachers union said in a statement earlier this year that it’s “extremely concerned about the rising violence — and the increasing severity of the acts being committed — in our schools.”
The kids are not okay, but neither are our teachers or our schools.
My oldest kids, Lucy and Edie, now graduated from high school, used to attend school in NYC when we lived there. Their public school was in East Harlem and occupied one floor of a larger school building. Teachers were supported with aids, teaching assistants, graduate students, and support staff like counselors and therapists. It was immediately noticeable when we moved here to Las Vegas that classrooms did not have the support of more than one individual. The girls often talked about one or two students holding the rest of the class hostage with their antics, behaviors and cutting up, which drove the teacher batty and focused their attention away from kids who wanted to learn.
Sometimes I think a lot of people who haven’t lived in other places, do not really understand how under-staffed our schools are. Combine a lack of support for teachers and students with a low pay (a new campaign to hire 1400 more teachers for the 2024-25 school year is offering $54,000 as a “very competitive” salary) and you have a serious WTF? moment. I mean, many veteran teachers make a little more than that now.
Of course this pay will only be enticing to new and inexperienced educators. Which brings us back to the first story I mentioned of the substitute who lost his cool and beat up a student. Would a more trained and experienced teacher, armed with de-escalation techniques and a true trauma-informed toolbox have done a better job?
Yes. Absolutely yes. We set this teacher up to fail by not arming him with tools.
I am reminded of the CCSD substitute this year who was caught in a TikTok “standing at a whiteboard in a classroom and starting to erase words, including a racial slur and the word and symbol “= Black.” This feels like the ultimate example of unvetted ignorance in the classroom.
Can we really leave the education of our students to teachers who are not educated enough themselves?
Can we really expect low paid, under-trained educators to work not just with typical kids, but all kinds of kids with trauma, developmental disabilities, impulse control, issues, the effects of poverty and racism, and do it inside a classroom alone with upwards of 30-40 kids?
Um, I don’t think so.
Part of the problem is a dysfunctional school board, still recovering from tumultuous leadership, exacerbated by being a low tax state with a part-time citizen legislature that meets every other year. We don’t have the available coffers and legislative might to subsidize schools (or any of our other problems) the way we need to. And when we do have money it is often used to correct a symptom, not a problem.
Nevadans need to start thinking more deeply about the roots of our problems. And the answer is not to follow in the foot steps of Texas, Florida, Arizona, Mississippi and South Dakota and allow teachers and other employees to carry a gun. Can you imagine if this teacher had a gun during this fight? Man, so much bad could’ve happened to the teacher and the student. Life-altering shit.
A big part of the problem is that there are no safety nets, few therapeutic supports, little mentoring for kids running off into the ditches. Programs that exist, like the Truancy Diversion Program (as part of Family Court), which targeted at-risk students and their families and gave them special family advocates who met with them weekly to mentor kids, manage challenges and provide supports and resources for the family, are being disbanded.
These students - and my son is one of them - can be disruptive and frustrating in a classroom. But they still need things they aren’t getting. And they still deserve things they need despite their challenging behaviors. Just because their cries for help and direction come with fists and slurs, and not polite tears and carefully constructed requests for help, doesn't mean we still shouldn’t be listening. They need so much more than what general public education, or even some of their families, can give them. We know that when kids are hurting, messed up at home, struggling - punishing them does not change behavior. It entrenches it. It entrenches them in distrust and then they move away from us toward even worse things.
Right now the answer we keep hearing from schools is that more policing is required. More suspensions and expulsions, more police calls. And we know what happens with more police interventions - see this video of a cop taking down a student for what appears to be little reason. More police means more removals from the classroom, more removals from life.
What happens to those kids? They are pipelined to the criminal justice system. They become the community’s problem even as we ask how all this crime is happening? These kids can be slotted into alternative “behavior schools” where they learn more disruptive skills from kids who have bigger problems than they do, or the Star program ( which is basically a kid in a room with his school work and a proctor). But the more we do that, the more irretrievable these kids are and the more we will have to deal with them as adults in the criminal justice system or continuing to struggle in the claustrophobic legacies of trauma and poverty across generations.
Our go-to as a society is to remove inconvenient people from our sight and then walk around believing we got the job done. As if this won’t come back and bite us in the ass. (For more of this, see our unhoused problem, where we like to hide inconvenient people, instead of actually helping them.)
What we need is more pay for teachers, more support (trained human bodies) for teachers in the classroom, more therapeutic and support services (more real live trained humans) on site in schools working with the toughest kids, and a way for us to consider out-of-the-box educational programs that can meet the needs of our most challenging students, bringing them and their families back into the folds of the community.
My son, for instance, does well in small groups and with a tutor twice a week. He can’t handle more than that. So why make him fit into a school box that doesn’t serve hm and only serves to fail the other students around him?
What we found out? His disabilities are so severe that whenever he didn’t understand something, he distracted everyone from his embarrassment of feeling “stupid” by playing the clown and trying to “be cool” by breaking things, being shocking and mouthing off. He didn’t care that no one thought it was cool. He was diverting their attention. He fought his way out, and no one at his schools (there were a few) were in a place to be curious enough to see what was up (even the supposed trauma-informed school was not very trauma-informed).
David and I had to become his informed advocates, plus his parents. There was no one else to do it.
Now he gets a lot of support managing relationships with friends and problem solving in relationships because he doesn’t come by it naturally. But we can do this because we aren’t struggling with keeping a roof over our heads. We have college degrees and solid careers and lots of community around us.
How many kids also have a hard time with this and it flies under the radar and instead, we say they need an ass-whoopin’? Or the parents are at fault? Or we level a shit load of punishments and consequences that do nothing but make them feel worse and less successful? Just because a kid is acting like a jerk doesn't mean he isn’t in pain or turmoil or experiencing some kind of difficulty.
Behaviors are communications, after all. They are not the problem. They are the symptom.
I know this is complicated. There are never easy answers. It will always be three steps forward, one step back. But teachers losing control and beating up kids for being assholes is not the answer. Teachers threatened and beaten by students is not acceptable. Teachers carrying weapons is stupid. Teachers having to take second jobs to live is ridiculous. Kids not getting their educational needs met because they are in a classroom so large the teacher is pretty much just managing the behavior problems defeats the whole point of being in school.
If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that we can shift, change, adapt. It’s time to start considering new ways of educating hard-to-educate kids by revamping the whole chaotic mess. Not burning it down - We need to use what we have and lean on excellent and veteran educators to lead the way for us. We need to put the money where they tell us to put the money. I have met some badass educators at all levels in this district and I want them to be weighing in heavily. We need to turn the fucking Titanic around before it hits the iceberg, if it hasn’t already.
This begins with changing our own ideas about education and kids themselves: We need to address the real tangled, complex, entrenched problems of our communities, not simply manage the symptoms that we see in the classroom, and then pat ourselves on the back and say we did a good job by calling the police or beating up a kid for being a jerk.
This isn’t a school district problem. This is a community problem. If we take care of the community, our families, our teachers, then everyone has a better school experience. And kids get a shot at growing into adults who do better and have more fulfilling, healthy, beautiful lives.
They - and we - deserve that.
_____________________
END NOTES:
In the video below of Lucy’s second grade class in 2013, I can see three educators in the room with the kids. And there could be more.
This was totally normal. It gave the main teacher, Vida, a chance to teach while other teachers managed particular issues or kid’s who needed to use the bathrooms, needed more support, etc.
Thank you, as always, for reading. xo Kim
This is a great awareness article. I keep coming back to all the Moloch traps we seem to be encountering, with the only way out being all of us working our way out collaboratively. If you're interested, here is my article on Moloch traps: https://blog.academicbiz.com/2024/04/the-moloch-trap.html
Thanks Rae!