I’m a retired high school teacher.
(I taught in a big city, so I don’t know about elsewhere.)
You would be surprised at how many violent assaults are not reported, how many of them don’t make the news. In my experience, for every 1 act of violence that the public knows about, there are 20 they don’t know about.
Administrators are all about PR these days. Gotta make the district look good. Everything else is secondary, including safety.
Often when a teacher is injured, he/she will be offered a deal. Don’t make a fuss, and your recovery time won’t be counted against your sick day total. No need to hurry back.
And sometimes: Don’t make a fuss, and we’ll transfer you to another school in the district. Go ahead, pick a nicer school. Your choice. We’ll get the paperwork done.
My sister taught math to mostly middle school kids and some HS kids for her entire 45 year career. Retired a couple years ago. She was in the Baltimore / DC / Annapolis area, then a magnet school in Baltimore the last 10 years. The stories she tells.
She was really good at it. You can imagine how unruly and challenging those kids were. It took her a while every new school year, but she got through to them and got results. She used to run across many of her former students on the street or while shopping and many of them told her how much influence she had on their lives. Very rewarding.
She saw the number of do-nothing administrators grow TEN times on a per-student basis. She said that they all knew how to teach better than her even though they had never spent a minute in a class. Fortunately, her schools didn’t have a lot of violence.
You wrote “Often when a teacher is injured, he/she will be offered a deal. Don’t make a fuss, and your recovery time won’t be counted against your sick day total. No need to hurry back.” — appalling. But consistent with what I heard from my sister.
When my sister started, the schools and administration were largely white. She saw the huge shift to minority / POC administration and teachers and the broad decline of performance.
It was always funny that, in the faculty lounge, she found that most of the other teachers had strong conservative values (family, hard work, performance, reward, etc) but all voted straight “D” and hated everything “R.” She was amazed at the cognitive dissonance at work there.
I also taught high school in a large city—NYC, matter of fact. What you say is very true—administrators don’t want their school characterized as a “dangerous school” and will go to extraordinary lengths, including what you said, to avoid teachers reporting violence perpetrated against them or other students. Or, they very well might say, “Report this and receive a nasty letter in your file or be brought up on charges. Charges for what? They’ll think of something. Transfer to a nicer school? That would be hard to find nowadays in NYC. They are pretty much equally lousy, with DEI, commie indoctrination of students, you name it. And who’s to say there won’t be a letter circulating about you being a troublemaker or some such?