Posted on 02/23/2025 11:43:06 PM PST by Morgana
A group of elementary school principals, preschool and kindergarten teachers this week told members of the Legislative Oversight Commission on Education Accountability one classroom horror story after the next of violent and often uncontrollable student behavior. The educators detailed their graphic tales in an effort to lobby for help, to urge legislators to bolster and pass 2024’s Senate Bill 614. The bill – which passed the House and Senate earlier this year but died in the final hours of the legislative session – would offer some of the behavior intervention and safety measures now in code for middle and high schools.
With nearly 30 years of education experience, Stephanie Haynes, principal at Kanawha County’s Bridgeview Elementary, gave examples of the disruptive students that take away her time for administration duties and keep teachers from teaching the majority of their students.
“‘Ken’ is in third grade,” Haynes said, using another name to protect the identity of the student. “In his career, since kindergarten, he has been suspended more than 30 times. He has kicked, head butted and punched me repeatedly. Most recently on Thursday, I spent 38 minutes, because I hit my watch, being actively and violently attacked by him. On Thursday, I actually called the police, and if you don’t know this, the police cannot help me.”
Chloe Laughlin, a Kanawha County Schools kindergarten teacher, talked of dealing with multiple disruptive students, and getting beaten up and yelled at daily. She gave examples regarding students A, B, C and D.
“Student D destroyed my classroom on multiple occasions, including flipping tables and chairs, throwing all items off of shelves and onto the floor,” Laughlin said. “He pulled down my metal blinds off of my windows, which I still do not have to this day, took dry erase markers and drew all over the floors, on the walls, cussed worse than a sailor, and called me and the other students terrible things, words that five-year-olds should never hear. The other students in the classroom were hit in the head. Objects were thrown at them, and they had to evacuate the classroom.”
Laughlin told legislators that families are taking their students out of school, not because of how our teachers teach, but because of how they are treated by the other students. She said across the state educational board, students and teachers are not getting the respect that they deserve and educators need help. Laughlin asked legislators about bolstering SB 614.
“Students can be removed from the classroom if the behavior is disorderly,” she said. ”Who makes this decision? Where do they go, and what staff will be in this alternative location? What about an alternative learning environment? There is one in Kanawha County for middle and high school, but elementary has none. We have a nine week program, but that is a Band-Aid to a much bigger problem. What happens to the students if there is no alternative learning center in their school district? I see that these resolutions are more clearly defined for middle and high school and with added portions for elementary yet these questions still stand.”
Morgan Elmore teaches preschool in Randolph County. She said she understands that children who have trauma often act out, but added that it does not give them an excuse to come to classrooms and beat other children, beat teachers and beat their friends. She said these problems and situations must be dealt with early.
“Students are coming to school with less and less basic knowledge,” Elmore said. “They’re coming to us not knowing their name, not knowing their birth date, but I’m supposed to teach Johnny these things while I have another student in the corner, tearing the room apart. Scores can’t go up if I can’t be teaching, and instead, have to be acting as a counselor. In Randolph County, we do not have alternative learning for elementary students. We don’t have the nine week program. We don’t have a building to put them in. They are left in the classrooms.”
Tina Wallen taught for 16 years. She is now a Raleigh County elementary school principal who said many disruptive student behaviors begin with challenges at home.
“We’re seeing a lot of kids with trauma,” Wallen said. “A lot of kids who are born to drug addicted parents and being raised by grandparents or great grandparents. A lot of times when they come to us in kindergarten, they’re not even potty trained. Seeing that more and more each year. We remove kids from the classroom. I’ve been kicked in the face while trying to restrain a kid, and he got loose and kicked me with a good old construction boot upside the jaw. You bring them to my office, they’ll run and flip the chairs, pull all the books off the shelves.”
Wallen said she didn’t feel like sending these students home was the best answer.
“Because this is kind of where these things are allowed to take place most of the time, she said. “I love my job. I love what I do. We just have to figure out some answers and some support. I feel like we need some type of training, maybe for families. I don’t think a lot of our families even know how to deal with this.”
The teachers and principals explained that they can’t take away recess as punishment because that time often goes into the required hours of physical education. They said that West Virginia does not have any inpatient therapy hospitals for kids this age, except for Highland and River Park, and only if they’re suicidal. They also told lawmakers that if a parent or guardian is looking for help for students like this, they have to look out of state.
Stepanie Haynes told commission members the learning percentages are skewed by disruptive students.
“Ninety-eight percent of the children are good and want to do well,” Haynes said. “It’s that one-to-two percent in the building that are so disruptive that the rest are suffering, and are not learning. And I can’t take their recess, and I can’t put my hands on them.”
The educators’ tales included: four-year-old students telling the teacher they’re going to shoot them with a gun and burn the school down; four-year-old students running and choking another student on the playground and punching them in the face on their very first day of school; a four-year-old slapping the teacher so hard that her glasses went flying across the room; a four-year-old student biting the teacher so hard that it drew blood and the teacher had to get medical attention; and a grade school student who was expelled because he brought a handful of ammunition and a large kitchen knife to class.
The commission chair, Sen. Amy Grady, R-Mason, said less than half of the counties in the state have elementary Behavior Intervention centers or behavior disorder classrooms available for elementary age students. She said the graphic behavior situations described here were statewide and key to systemic education failures.
“Until we get these behaviors under control, we’re not going to see an improvement in test scores, and our enrollment keeps declining,” Grady said. “It’s not just because people just want to send their kids to a private school or want to homeschool. They feel like it’s best for them, because they’re getting them out of situations like this to where they’re not seeing these behaviors and being affected or traumatized in many cases.
Until we get control of this, we’re not going to see any of that stuff go up. And so we have to take this seriously. And this has to be a priority this session,” Grady said.
Overview of Bridgeview Elementary School
The school’s minority student enrollment is 27%. The student-teacher ratio is 16:1, which is worse than that of the district. The student population is made up of 48% female students and 52% male. https://shorturl.at/ZtUsJ
Not mentioned is that most kids currently in elementary school were no more than toddlers at the beginning of the “plandemic”, which tore a huge hole in the social development of children around that time, regardless of ethnic/demographic background.
Lay that one at the feet of Prez Houseplant and his minions: Birx, Fauci et al.
When I was young, the wat parents broke a child from biting was when they bit, they were bitten back. From what I recall, it never took more than twice. Most were cured after one time. i don’t believe they will let you do that today, but it worked than. And other things worked then, such as the application of daddy’s belt to the hind end of a child that was throwing a temper tantrum [throwing a fit].
It's a wooden board, and we used to call it a paddle.
More than likely Methhead parents. The biggest problem is the idea that children must be in schools. The other kids are held hostage. My kids had to go through this.
It’s the parents
The public school can’t do anything to solve bad parenting.
But publik skrewls do a dandy job of enabling bad parenting.
Dismantle DOE immediately
So many Freepers have been blaming the teachers. I have been trying hard to divert attention to the parents, where the blame belongs. This now plays out in most every classroom, generally not at such intensity. With even a little of that goings on in class, a 40 minute period can be rendered useless. It is foolish to expect teachers to teach savages.
that’s what happens when you pay useless people to breed ...
I have heard of this kind of behavior from kids from other adults.
The excuse given is that problem kids are to be mainstreamed in the least restrictive environment possible. So the kid goes and tears up the classroom and while the teacher’s aide stands and watches the kid lose it, the teacher takes the rest of the class to another room.
And they cannot discipline or physically restrain the kid.
IMO, these kids are basically BEGGING some adult to take charge and be in control. I think they know it’s wrong and want to see how far they can push it before someone cares enough to stop them. And yet, teachers are not allowed to. Then the only punishment the kid gets is to (supposedly) clean up the mess they made.
This is why when I hear stories of kids being put in time out rooms that are devoid of furniture and let them finish their temper tantrum I suspect that while there’s a public outcry against that kind of treatment of kids, I take it with a grain of salt. What are the schools supposed to do?
And why is the kid let into the public school with the rest of the kids in the first place?
One big problem, though, it homes like the kind you see on COPS, where the parents drink, do drugs, and are violent themselves. Sending them home for the day only puts them back in the environment where they learned to cuss like sailors in the first place.
FWIW< I did see one kid about 5 once, acting out and calling adults names and swearing at them worse than a drunken sailor. It was tragic because you know the kid has NO future but jail once he reaches 18, if he survives that long.
> Unparented<
Some are being raised by their 30 year old grandmother.
EC
When we lived in Upstate NY in a welfare town, there was a family next door where the mother had to have an IQ of no more than 70, tops, and a series of boyfriends and their friends who sexually abused her kids. Turns out she did too, but that’s another tragic story.
Anyways, her 5 year old daughter was in that condition. she wandered the neighborhood, FILTHY, barefoot, barely dressed, and she could not put together a sentence much less two coherent words together. My son was about 2 at the time and could communicate FAR, FAR better than she could.
Eventually, Social Services got involved and the kids were removed from that home and put in foster care.
She’s not “complaining to the media”.
She’s testifying to the State Legislature.
I realize that those two entities might be indistinguishable to some folks, but most intelligent people can tell the difference.
I don't know ... why do you think that?
My very limited experience is that these violent bipeds, brought up wrong and trained to do worse, come in a range of skin colors.
Oh I don’t know
You would think human excrement would be classified as hazardous waste. Are teachers certified to protect their students from exposure to hazardous substances? Doubtful.
A generation of ferals is coming of age very soon. We're going to need bigger prisons, not to mention reopen the mental institutions.
I often wonder what changing the diet of some of these kids might accomplish.
I know my son was very sensitive to artificial vanilla flavor. He ate something with that in it and he literally was bouncing off the walls. Another close friend has a son sensitive to Red 40 and it would turn the kid into a cruel monster. Nice kid otherwise, but she could ALWAYS tells when he snuck candy.
I caught a lot of flack from other parents about how picky I was about their diet and *overprotecting them* but that was tough. They were my kids and I had to live with them, and I was not going to destroy my kids to satisfy other adults.
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And of course, I got criticized for homeschooling my kids because *socialization*.
Yeah, well that was the point. The kids they would have gone to school with were the monsters I saw running feral down the street from us. I knew what kind of socialization they'd be exposed to.
NO WAY!!!
The Board of Education is applied to the Seat of Learning.
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