I had a student last year who was switched to my Team after an incident I wasn’t told about with another teacher. All I was told was that he had had a problem with one of his previous teachers and that’s why he was moved. After about a month, I started noticing him trying to push boundaries with me: taking personal items off of my desk, getting in my personal space (this student is over 6′ tall), muttering things under his breath every time I finished talking, refusing to work, and laughing with his friends every time he did any of this. The final straw came when I saw a pencil go flying across the room. I didn’t see who had done it, but this particular class had had a problem with this before and I warned the whole class that if I saw another student through a pencil they would get a referral. Not 5 minutes later, I looked up and saw this student haul back and chuck a pencil straight at another student. I told him he was getting a referral for it, and he immediately blew up, getting in my face and backing me up against the wall, shouting at me to “Shut the f*** up” and “f*** off” and calling me a b**** with his fists balled up. Eventually he stormed out of the room and I ran to call security down to my room, and they caught up with him. This happened in the last two minutes of class, and because the admin in charge of discipline wasn’t on campus that day, he was allowed to go and was on time for his next class. The teacher in that class came to tell me that he was bragging about it to his friends in there. I emailed admin about it, and that I didn’t feel safe with him in there and asked to have him removed from my class, which they did. 2 days after he returned from his 5 day suspension. Turns out the reason he was switched to my class because he had done the same thing to his last teacher.

That was last year. Today I’m filling out a threat assessment for him because he did it again, except this time he did it to admin. If only someone had warned them.