The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
When to step into school fights a dilemma
A video of a Douglass High School ninth grader repeatedly punching a prostrate teacher in the head illustrates in graphic detail the risk to teachers who intervene in student fights. The teacher ended up at the hospital, but, fortunately, suffered minor injuries, according to Atlanta Public Schools. The student faces charges.
The viral video raises the question of how prepared teachers are for classroom combat. Is there any solid guidance on when a teacher should get in the middle of warring students? Is it only when a child appears in mortal danger? Or, is it never, due to the danger exemplified by the APS video?
Colleges of education don’t devote much time to talking about how to safely break up fights between students beyond verbal commands, said education professor Bryan
Sorohan. “That’s because there is no safe, legally immune way to stop one once the situation has escalated beyond the teacher’s ability to verbally intervene.”
It puts teachers in a no-win situation. “We’ve seen teachers injured trying to intervene with violent students, but teachers, family, students, and schools would have to live with the physical and emotional consequences of non-action that led to serious injury or death,” said Sorohan. “And please don’t make me laugh by claiming that a teacher who failed to intervene would not be subjected to lawsuits and excoriated in the press if a student died because of her non-action.”
But non-action — at least non-physical action — is what attorney Mike McGonigle advises. As general counsel to the Georgia Association of Educators, McGonigle said, “My view and advice to teachers is not to interject yourself to break up a fight. Those things can turn in a heartbeat where the kids are now pummeling the teacher. Hit the panic button, get on the phone and call the front office, call the school resource officer — those are the folks that have the responsibility for breaking up a fight, not the classroom educator.”
“I would question whether every teacher has access to a ‘panic button’ or a direct and open phone line to the front office or school resource officers,” said Sorohan. “Rural school systems in particular are not usually as well-appointed with such amenities as suburban metro systems. My public school teaching days were a number of years ago, but I suspect many teachers are still in the situation I found myself in: teaching in a ‘portable classroom’ nearly a quarter of a mile from the front office with basically no means of directly contacting anyone there. In a fight between nearly grown students, it can take about two seconds for real harm to be done.”
The major metro districts don’t have policies that directly speak to student fighting, but rather relate to a general use of “restraints.” Gwinnett, Cobb, DeKalb and Fulton pointed to policies that allow physical restraint in situations where students are an immediate danger to themselves or others and are “not responsive to less intensive behavioral interventions including verbal directives or other de-escalation techniques.”
“There is not a Board of Education policy specially set to guide teacher interventions of fights, as has been the conversation on social media and our community,” said Fulton spokesman Brian Noyes. However, Noyes said new Fulton Superintendent Mike Looney “is open to addressing this and reviewing whether a policy may be needed for the future.”
McGonigle said, “My speculation is that districts are deliberately ambiguous or deliberately silent for their own issues of liability. At the beginning of every year, teachers sit through hours and hours of policy review and sign documents that they read this, that and the other thing. It’s kind of interesting there seems to be more of a void in terms of written guidance on this.”
Sorohan believes the Georgia Code of Ethics for Educators ought to encompass teacher responses to student fights. “The code already addresses teacher conduct toward students, including physical contact, in detail. Such a provision would satisfy the need for teachers to be protected from liability if they carried out an approved intervention in good faith. District policies will have to account for whatever is in the code, and liability issues will be alleviated by a clear state legal directive on the issue. Hanging teachers out to dry, or more accurately putting them in harm’s way to avoid district liability issues, is simply not acceptable,” he said.
So what do teachers do when faced with a student fight they fear is escalating? I put the question to educators on social media. A handful said they’d insert themselves into the altercation. “I will try and break it up. If my getting hurt prevents another good student from being killed, it’s worth the risk,” said a teacher.
Most others shared this view, born of a busted lip early in a career, “I don’t break fights up anymore. In 2007 I was punched in the face while trying to intervene.”
The National Center for Education Statistics says 1 out of 10 public school teachers reported being threatened with injury by a student from their school, and 6% reported being physically attacked.
Sid Chapman, former president of GAE, said, “Over the years, I have broken up fights. I have stepped between both boys and girls fighting. I’m not sure if I would do that now. Teachers and other educators are afraid of being injured, sued, disciplined or fired. At the same time, they want to protect students.”
McGonigle understands the protective urge, but encourages teachers to suppress it.
“It might be easier for me to say resist the temptation to intervene from my ivory tower. And teachers are the most caring people I know. But I would rather they not have that type of discretion to make a decision on their own to intervene. Because what if they do and something unforeseen happens? They might overreact and be charged criminally. Get the people whose job it really is to take care of these situations.”