Exclusionary Discipline Is the Only Adequate Response to Violence
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder argues that when students are violent, removing them from the school environment is the only response that adequately protects staff and other students.
Key Takeaways
- Violence demands exclusion - Students and staff deserve to be protected from physical harm, period
- Other students' rights matter - The right to learn in a safe environment outweighs the violent student's preference to stay in school
- This isn't about punishment - Exclusion is about safety, not retribution
Transcript
Exclusionary discipline has gotten a bad rap in recent years, but it's crucial if we want to protect teachers and aides and other school staff and students from violence at school.
We need to be able to send kids home.
We need to be able to send kids out of class.
And these policies that say you can never send a kid out of class, you have to just understand their unmet needs if they're being violent.
Like, the unmet need thing makes a certain amount of sense with very, very young children.
But over time, we get a sense that like, okay, this kid is not just hungry.
They don't need a diaper change.
They're much too old for that.
Like if we are having violence, we need to have consequences for that.
And those consequences need to include removal.
And if we are unwilling to use removal, we will have more violence.
And we know this from what happens with adults, right?
And I hesitate to make any kind of comparison to domestic violence situation, but there really is no safe route other than removing yourself from the situation, right?
And I think...
So many policymakers, people like myself who have not experienced domestic violence personally, have a little bit of a blind spot around this.
And certainly I've heard from hundreds and hundreds of people who have been injured at work and have been assaulted by students.
And some of them had also previously experienced violence in their personal lives.
And I just don't think we can really understand what it's like to be in that situation where at work, from students you are supposed to care about, you're experiencing violence that brings up all kinds of things that you would rather forget, that have happened to you in the past, that were traumatizing.
We cannot have this kind of thing occurring to people at work.
We have to have the boundary of If you commit an act of violence against the people in your classroom or in your school setting, then you are removed.
And in some cases, I think that removal needs to be permanent, right?
Like if your daughter had an abusive boyfriend, you would not say, well, just try to figure out what his unmet needs are and then give him some time to cool off and then I'm sure things will be fine.
No, you would say, you need to end this relationship.
You need to get out.
You need to never talk to this guy again.
And I think we've got to make that same thing possible for our school staff, whether we're talking about teachers or aides who work directly with students, because who wants to go to work with someone who has hurt them?
I mean, we have to remember that teachers and other educators are not there as parents.
They're there as employees at work who have their own families, their own lives to think about.
We have got to create safety, first and foremost, if we want to have anything good happen at all at school.
And we have got to make it a, you know, I think in some cases a permanent boundary that says, like, if you assault a teacher or if you assault an aide, you're done.
You don't get to work with that person again.
Now, you may not be expelled.
You may come back.
You know, there may be continued educational opportunities for you either at that setting or in a different setting.
But you've lost the opportunity to work with that person.
And I think I said in another video, I got an email from someone who had been assigned a student who had been removed from a pregnant teacher's classroom because of violence.
And I think, you know, as students burn through the adults who are available to work with them, that does need to have permanent consequences, right?
Like if you run out of teachers who can work with you because you've hurt all the teachers, that's how life works, right?
That is okay for us to run out of staff to work with you and for you to be done with us as a result of that because that's how life works.
You don't get infinite chances to just beat people up.
And I think that needs to be true in school just as it's true outside of school.
Let me know what you think.