When a Student Is Violent, They Need to Be Sent Home

What do we do about students who are violent at school, especially in places where there are laws now against suspending students for almost any reason?

One thing I think we've got to really look closely at is the provisions for dealing with violence.

In almost every case that I'm aware of, it is allowable to suspend a student from school if they are actually violent towards someone else, if they hurt someone else.

And what we've seen in state legislatures is an attempt to cut down on kind of bogus suspensions, right?

Like, probably it's a nationwide problem, but especially in some states, we've had just a huge problem with students getting suspended for dumb reasons, like being absent, right?

No student should get suspended for being absent, just doesn't even make any sense.

But that doesn't mean that we should take away suspension entirely, and here's why.

When a student is violent towards someone else in the school environment, the school environment is a compulsory environment.

And normally when someone is violent toward you, you leave the situation, right?

That is the healthy thing to do when someone else is violent.

You get away from them.

And in school, we don't really have that option.

You can't just walk away.

You can't just end the relationship.

And I'm really concerned about what we're modeling for our students.

And what we're setting our students who are on the other side, you know, the students who are having these violent behaviors, what we're setting them up for as adults and what we're asking our staff to experience, especially if they have experienced domestic violence in their personal lives.

I think we have to have an option for people to get away from violence.

And in a school environment, that means the student who is violent needs to be excluded for a while.

And depending on the situation, depending on the repetition or the severity, maybe permanently.

So these laws that say you can't suspend a kid under third grade or you can't suspend students for, you know, any but a handful of reasons, we have to make sure that those reasons include violence, that it is okay to suspend students out of school for violence in those severe cases.

And if for some reason your policies do not allow that, I would really encourage you, again, to look.

But what's going to happen is we're going to end up expelling or emergency excluding or placing in alternative schools, more of those students that would previously have simply been suspended.

And I think we've always got to be mindful that there are unintended consequences when we make policies like that, that try to cut down on something just with a rule, right?

Like we can't solve student behavior with just a ban on suspension.

That doesn't make the problem go away.

But we've got to find a way to keep our staff safe, to keep our students safe when they do have those violent behaviors.

So if we have laws against them we've got to find ways to push back we've got to find ways to work around it let me know what you think