Posted on 04/15/2002 5:52:12 AM PDT by summer
Bad kids in class
By Shannon Colavecchio and Kimberly Miller, Palm Beach Post Staff Writers
During an unruly school assembly at Forest Hill High, a student hit veteran English teacher Tadziu Trotsky upside the head as he tried to maintain order. The strike left his temple swollen.
Trotsky has watched students tear down blinds in his classroom and walked in to find their obscene messages written on the walls.
He has been cursed at countless times and called unprintable names by students who didn't feel like doing his assignments or following his orders.
"After a while, you don't want to say anything to the kids because you're afraid of what they'll do," he said.
Little by little during his 35-year teaching career, Trotsky's excitement for teaching great literary works waned in the face of these increasingly defiant students, who are too busy calling him names and destroying the classroom to care much about Othello and Robert Frost.
By the time he left the school in 1996, even the honors students were coming in with bad attitudes.
"It was awful, gut-wrenching really," said Trotsky, who now teaches at the Sabal Palm alternative school in West Palm Beach. Sabal Palm is one of 29 district alternative education programs, established especially for students with repeated, serious discipline problems.
Ironically, Trotsky finds the teaching is more tolerable at Sabal Palm because the school is strict enough and students' time managed tight enough that it cuts down on discipline problems.
During interviews with dozens of Palm Beach County teachers and school district officials, The Palm Beach Post heard account after account of chaotic classrooms where smart-aleck students make a habit of disobedience -- stealing teachers' attention and disrupting learning for the rest of the children.
Teachers interviewed said student discipline problems are the worst they've ever been, and district records show the number of student disciplinary infractions reported has risen sharply among middle schoolers. Teachers describe schools where administrators brush aside behavior problems for fear of a negative image or they're overwhelmed with other duties, and where parents provide little support to educators. Consider: At Roosevelt Middle School, a student spit in a teacher's coffee, and at West Riviera Elementary, two girls got into a fight so nasty that one smashed a coffee pot to use the sharp edges as a weapon. Students have thrown desks at teachers and threatened to have them beaten up.
Teachers -- often only in private teacher lounges or on the condition they not be identified -- complain that student behavior is their No. 1 problem, and it's getting worse.
Marjorie Haughton, a teacher at Belvedere Elementary in West Palm Beach, hasn't been hit or threatened or called bad names.
But she is leaving her profession this summer after 20 years because she is tired of constantly reprimanding her students and seeing her classroom control tactics fizzle amid students who are "deceitful."
She used to put marbles in jars, and the team of students who got the most marbles for good behavior would win a prize. Then students started putting their own marbles in the jars behind her back. If she wrote points on the blackboard for the teams to rack up, some student would brush by them "on accident" and erase the points.
"I'm tired of playing those games," she said. "It's a doggy biscuit training thing. If they don't see you holding the biscuit, they won't do the right thing just because it's the right thing to do."
School records for the past two school years -- 1999-2000 and 2000-2001 -- show unruly student behavior rose districtwide, up to 211,082 incidents last year from 205,605 incidents the year before.
It's difficult for teachers to teach and students to learn amid the misbehavior of a comparatively small number of children wreaking large amounts of havoc on the classroom.
Those unruly few cost the district $18.3 million each year in alternative education programs for them.
School officials attribute the deepening problem to a variety of factors: district administrators afraid they'll be sued for disciplining too harshly; principals, afraid of the "bad school" label, who downplay teachers' concerns; a societal shift that has left educators, in the eyes of both parents and students, at the bottom of the totem pole of respect; and broken families run by dysfunctional parents or relatives who don't know how to raise children.
Some have problems at home
Consider from a student's perspective:
A child at Okeeheelee Middle School started acting out. When administrators investigated, the student was found to be living by himself in a trailer home after his mother left him. A little girl at Barton Elementary has dreams about killing people. A grandmother is raising eight children, one of whom is falling asleep in class because she has to help take care of her siblings.
"In the old days, when I was in school, teachers got classrooms where students were ready and willing to learn," said Alison Adler, director of the district's Safe Schools Center. "Now you get students with barriers like being behind academically, coming from unstable homes. They get frustrated and they act out."
Adler conceded it's mostly discipline problems -- and not low salaries or the school violence concerns that have garnered so much attention -- that beat down teachers and prompt many of them to flee the profession.
"The bulk of the problems in our classrooms are the three D's: disruptive behavior, disorderly conduct, disrespectful language," Adler said.
Discipline is especially problematic in middle schools, according to a Palm Beach Post analysis of school district figures, based on incidents reported by school administrators.
Students in the district's middle schools last year committed 108,630 incidents, from stealing and pulling a false fire alarm to cheating and battery. That averages to three incidents for every middle school student.
Most significantly, just over two-thirds of those incidents -- 75,970 -- were discipline problems affecting the classroom: disruptive behavior, disobedience and insubordination, rules violations and disrespectful language.
Last year's incidents in those categories marked a 13 percent increase from the 1999-2000 year, when administrators reported 89,959 incidents, or 2.6 incidents for every middle school student. Of that year's total, 66,012 incidents reported were for disruptive behavior, disobedience and insubordination, rules violations and disrespectful language.
The numbers are not as high in elementary and high schools, where reported incidents actually decreased from 1999-2000 to 2000-2001. But students in grades K-5 and 9-12 have the same tendency toward the "three D's" as middle schoolers, according to The Post analysis.
For example, high school administrators last year reported 74,793 incidents, or nearly two incidents per student. Of the incidents, 49,264 were cases of disobedience, disruptive behavior, rules violations and disrespectful language.
In elementary schools, 19,483 of the 27,659 incidents reported last year were in those categories.
Dave Benson of the district's Safe Schools Center, which keeps track of student discipline reports, cautioned that the statistics might not accurately reflect what's going on from one school to the next.
One principal might be vigilant about documenting every student who comes into the principal's office; another might handle incidents like back-talking and cursing without paperwork.
And changes in reporting requirements from year to year have left many administrators confused about how to document incidents, Benson said. Just this year, district officials unveiled a new, more uniform reporting form for administrators that has a host of new categories, including "repetitive disobedience" and "disruptive play."
Teachers counter that some administrators aren't confused; they just don't report everything because they don't want to paint a less-than-rosy picture of their schools.
Action taken immediately
Egret Lake Elementary Principal Amy Sansbury said she tries to handle discipline problems immediately and has even hired a special teacher whose only job is to work with misbehaving students.
"We need to be able to provide teachers with the means to be able to teach the whole time they are in the classroom," Sansbury said.
But principals also admit that support is inconsistent.
Ellyn Smith, president-elect of the Florida Association of Elementary and Middle School Principals, said problems with contacting parents sometimes can make it appear that the administration is dragging its heels on discipline issues.
Most principals address problems based on the severity of the incident, Smith said. This could leave teachers with minor misbehavior issues waiting while bigger problems are addressed.
"The teacher may feel that it should be dealt with immediately, but there could be extenuating circumstances that delay the issue," Smith said.
Middle school special education teacher Jay Back said he spends 30 percent of his time dealing with student behavior. That's 16 minutes in each class period, leaving just 34 minutes for actual instruction.
During a year's time, maintaining student discipline eats up 48 hours from each of Back's classes.
Students who repeatedly misbehave in class also carry a hefty price tag for taxpayers.
If the students are placed in one of the district's 29 alternative education programs, the annual individual cost to educate them could climb from about $5,150 to $8,051.
Nearly 2,300 Palm Beach County students are now in alternative education programs, whose annual budgets total $18.3 million. Much of that money goes to keeping class sizes at 17 students.
The majority of alternative education schools, some of which are run by the Department of Juvenile Justice or contracted out to private companies, are for students with discipline problems.
And there's no shortage of applicants. Nearly 800 students were reviewed for alternative education seats before the beginning of this semester, recommended for placement by frustrated administrators or parents.
"Alternative education is expensive, and if you want to help kids, you need funding," said Shelley Vana, president of Palm Beach County Classroom Teachers Association. "We don't want teachers worrying that if they put a student out of their classroom, another teacher in the school will have to handle it. We want the student put in a school where they'll get help."
Superintendent Art Johnson says maintaining discipline requires a constant vigil.
"Curriculum is the lifeblood of the school, and discipline is the backbone, the spine that holds things up," Johnson said. "If you don't have that discipline, that structure, learning doesn't happen."
A no-nonsense system can be implemented districtwide, but "it takes a considerable amount of time when you're talking about 150 schools," led by administrators with different styles and levels of experience, he said.
Teachers must set the tone
Education experts say teachers must set the tone of the classroom from the first day. Yet in most colleges and universities, courses in classroom management aren't required for a teaching certificate. Moreover, teachers say student behavior shouldn't be all their responsibility.
Where are the parents, they ask.
"You simply can't put this all on teachers," said University of Virginia professor Robert Pianta, who specializes in classroom management and student behavior.
Sometimes, the problem lies in the parents, who can be as ill behaved as the students, Pianta said.
"I think every principal has had the experience when a child gets in trouble, we call the parents and they just come in and scream at us," said Terry Costa, principal of Christa McAuliffe Middle in suburban Boynton Beach. "I can't imagine my parents ever doing that. Years ago, I think there was a respect that entire families, our society, instilled for teachers."
But the problems vary from school to school and classroom to classroom.
Harry Winkler, a teacher at Forest Hill High since 1972, says his students are increasingly apathetic and disinterested in learning, but they generally don't misbehave.
Scott McNichols, a 26-year-old teacher at Westward Elementary School in West Palm Beach, said his fifth-grade students are so well behaved he rarely has to raise his voice.
He said he sets a serious tone in his classroom from day one and follows through with consequences for each student who breaks a rule.
"Every year, of course, it's something new," McNichols said. "Behavior management is one of those things where you just have to try different things and see what works for you."
Staff writer Mary Ellen Flannery and database editor Christine Stapleton contributed to this report.
My wife is a superb teacher with ten years experience. She teaches at a private Christian school which pays about 1/3 of what she used to make in public schools. But at this school she:
The student was suspended for three days. THREE DAYS! Of course, the parents placed all blame on my wife. It was all her fault, you see.
I was a real punk in school and stayed in trouble, but the thought of slugging a teacher never crossed my mind. If I ever did, and the school had told my dad about it, I would not be here today.
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