Violent and Destructive Student Behavior Getting Worse

Violent and destructive student behavior continues to get worse in schools across the nation, and current consequences do not seem to be stopping the behavior. Can schools and districts properly handle outrageous behavior before things become out of control?

Restorative Justice in Schools

In 2018, I wrote about the alarming lack of consequences for violent and destructive behavior in my book More Teacher Misery. Schools across the U.S. were adopting a new way of handling student behavioral issues called “restorative justice” due to student behavior getting worse. Rather than punish a student through suspension, restorative justice in schools asks the misbehaving student to reflect on his or her behavior, take responsibility, and resolve to do better in the future.

This process often involves students and teachers sitting in a “restorative circle,” in which the guilty student listens to the views of their peers and then gets to speak his or her mind. Other restorative practices include:

• Writing a letter of apology
• Verbally apologizing
• Participating in a fundraiser
• Writing a speech or reflection paper.

Although many students do see writing anything as a form of punishment, most of these consequences are not really severe enough considering the offenses the students are guilty of. Plus, there are not enough resources to properly oversee these programs, and students usually just don’t do them.

Zero Tolerance Policy in Schools

The Restorative Justice movement in schools became popular a few years ago as a backlash against zero-tolerance discipline policies in schools. Zero-tolerance policies in schools have led to larger numbers of youths being out of school due to suspension. It seems counterintuitive to force a student to miss school in response to troublesome behavior.

There is also a racial/ethnic disparity in which students receive punishments and the severity of the punishment. Suspension is also strongly linked to failure to graduate and a higher likelihood of ending up in jail. This sounds great in theory, but of course, as with everything suggested to us in education, in practice it is a whole different ball game.

Does Restorative Justice Work in Schools?

Before COVID and remote learning struggles, implementing restorative justice measures could take days, even weeks, as schools coordinated talking circles around the schedules of teachers, principals, counselors, parents, and even campus police — all of whom must take time out and meet to deal ever-so-delicately with a single problem student.

For the most part, the restorative justice measures were never implemented or followed up on at all. Students received the message that they could pretty much do and say whatever they felt like with zero consequences.

In NYC schools, teachers’ lives were being threatened regularly, violence increased by 50%, gang activity increased by 39%. Teachers everywhere were struggling to control their students and started quitting in droves before COVID ever happened.

They reported extremely dangerous and troubling behaviors that were going completely unchecked such as trying to suffocate others, violently attacking their teachers, written and verbal threats to the teacher’s life, stealing and destroying teachers’ property, throwing furniture and even punching through a glass window.

Lack of Consequences for Violent and Destructive Behavior

After students started to return to the classroom after remote learning, the consequences for poor behavior were completely non-existent. Teachers were told to give “grace, leniency, and understanding” for the traumatic experience that children had just endured. This translated to “do what you want, say what you want, choose not to do work if you like, and still pass.”

Young people’s psychology as far as rules, consequences, boundaries, and routines isn’t very complicated. Most educators, psychologists, and observant parents agree that the rules and boundaries must be crystal clear and consequences must be followed through. And kids will inevitably test those boundaries to see where the limits are. They do this to comfort themselves in a way. “That’s as far as I can go, now I know.”

The more they get away with, the more they will push. And now we are having a serious problem in our country with younger and younger kids doing more destructive and violent things for no apparent reason. And as those incidents continue to lack serious consequences, these situations will only increase.

Student Behavior Getting Worse

We all know there have been many mass shootings committed recently, but I am only going to focus on crimes committed by those under 18. Here is an overview of a few very alarming examples of violence and destruction in the span of 7 months in 2021-2022:

• On June 25th, 2022, an 8-year-old boy and two 10-year-old girls broke into Vidalia junior high school and completely destroyed every single classroom in the building. Spraypaint covered many surfaces with curse words, smartboards and computers were completely destroyed, all furniture was overturned, and they caused hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage. Officers on the scene said they had never seen such extensive damage done by vandals. The students have been given court dates but how much can be done at such young ages?
• On June 10th, 2022, three kids between the ages of 12 and 14 started a fire that “took more than 20 fire departments from neighboring towns and across state lines to put out,” and destroyed a total of four buildings, creating $4 million in damages. The buildings contain a serious amount of asbestos which creates “an imminent danger to the public.”
• On May 29th, 2022, a 10-year-old boy was arrested for threatening to commit a mass shooting at his school. This came days after the Uvalde school shooting. The sheriff who made the arrest said that he feels the child’s parents were afraid to discipline him. “When I was growing up… you understood what was right and wrong, and today, what do we do? Society says, well, if your parent disciplines you and there’s any kind of abuse, come forward, so we can report your parent. “So parents are afraid,” he continued. “They’re afraid to discipline their kids.”
• On May 13, 2022, a high school student threw boiling hot noodles at his teacher’s face in Massachusetts. Police said the teacher said she was in “excruciating pain” and “the left side of her face, ear and eye were stinging,” and went to the school nurse, who recommended she seek medical attention. The principal said they would call 911 but did not. The teacher took herself to an urgent-care clinic and told police she would see a doctor to evaluate the burns.
• On April 27, 2022, a high school student hit his teacher on the head with a hammer. The student was escorted to the office and sent home after the student’s parents were notified. Police said they were investigating, but no arrests were made.
• On April 8, 2022, a 16-year-old student in Las Vegas attacked his teacher after he went to her classroom to discuss his grades. According to his arrest report, he choked the teacher with a “rope or string,” knocked her unconscious by slamming her head into a table, and moved a shelf on top of the woman and sat on it. He admitted that he tried to rape her when she was unconscious and when she awoke he was pouring something on her and trying to light a fire.
• On March 9, 2022, a series of clips started circulating online showing a 73-year-old substitute teacher at a middle school being struck in the head. Multiple junior high students can be seen hurling chairs at the man. One student in particular became angry when the sub insisted that he leave the class, since he wasn’t assigned to be there. The student threw a chair at the sub’s head, leaving him bloody. And yeah, the sub threw a chair back. But can you blame him?
• On March 2, 2022, a south Florida teacher was taken to the hospital after she was attacked by a 5-year-old student, leaving her “dazed” and “unresponsive,” officials said. The instructor was found by first responders “sitting on the ground against the wall” and although she was blinking and breathing, an officer noted that she was otherwise “unresponsive,” saying that at no point was she able to “vocally respond or show signs of a response.” She was so severely injured, she had to be intubated and will need surgery, her union says.
• On February 10, 2022, a teacher and baseball coach was attacked by four middle school students after telling them they weren’t allowed to ride dirt bikes and ATVs on school property. The students, who were interrupting baseball practice, didn’t like being reprimanded by the teacher and proceeded to chase him down and attack him, breaking his arm.
• In early November, 2021, a middle school in Oregon shut down in-person learning to address major behavioral concerns. Parents had been protesting and begging for more school security and resources after a streak of serious fights. The fights and disruptive behavior had escalated so much that the only thing the school could do was shut down.
• On November 2, 2021, two 16-year-old students followed their Spanish teacher into the woods and killed her with a baseball bat. They hid the 66-year-old’s body under a tarp and wrote about it on Snapchat. One of the students was angered after he argued with the teacher about his grades that day.

Of course these are only a handful of the outrageously violent and destructive behavior our minors have shown recently. It is also important to note that according to the New York Times, “Six of the nine deadliest mass shootings in the United States since 2018 were by people who were 21 or younger, representing a shift for mass casualty shootings, which before 2000 were most often initiated by men in their mid-20s, 30s and 40s.”

Where Do We Go From Here?

Student behavior was getting worse before the pandemic, and our complete lack of consequences for violent behavior and mental health resources only means that things will get continue to escalate. But how much worse can they get and when will we finally make changes to make school a safer place?

There’s no denying this violent behavior causes lasting damage. You can read a personal report of violent student behavior in my post –  County Says Student Attack that Caused Brain Damage was Teacher’s Fault here on the blog. Have you experienced student behavior getting worse in your school or district? Please share your experiences below, or Submit a Secret to Teacher Misery.