South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
VIOLENCE CONSUMING CLASSROOMS
State and federal laws handcuff schools as children rage out of control in class
Out of the blue, the student balled his fists and punched his teacher in the face, pummeling her until she was dazed and crying, a police report says.
By the time a calm returned to Northeast High in Oakland Park, two teachers and an aide were in ambulances. The special needs student wasn’t arrested because he “cannot tell the difference between right and wrong behaviors,” a police sergeant wrote in his report.
Three days later, the teen was back on campus.
In school after school, students are erupting with violence. They stab or beat teachers. They throw furniture. They stalk and attack classmates, turning schoolrooms into danger zones where the rights of violent students with disabilities trump all others.
In an eight-month investigation, the South Florida Sun Sentinel found that a sweeping push for “inclusion” enables unstable children to attend regular classes even though school districts severely lack the support staff to manage them.
State and federal laws guarantee those students a spot in regular classrooms until they seriously harm or maim others. Even threatening to shoot classmates is not a lawful reason to expel the child.
Violent students have injured thousands of teachers, bus drivers
and staff in Broward County alone and undoubtedly thousands more across Florida, records obtained by the Sun Sentinel show.
“It’s just a no-win scenario right now,” said attorney Julie Weatherly, of Mobile, Alabama, who advises school districts on the legal complexities of removing aggressive students when they have a disability. “Nobody wants a Parkland, of course. It’s this huge nightmare.”
‘The child comes back’
The federal law had a noble purpose when enacted more than four decades ago, long before the ranks of violent students swelled. It ensured that students with disabilities received an education in the same classrooms as their peers, a practice known as
mainstreaming.
Florida went even further, requiring agreement from the parents, or a judge, before transferring a disabled child to a special-needs school with more therapeutic services and smaller class sizes.
The drawback today is that the law treats a student with a severe behavioral disorder the same as a harmless student with Down syndrome, ordering that they be educated in regular classrooms unless it’s proven impossible.
To understand how schools became targets of deadly threats and violence, the Sun Sentinel interviewed more than 50 teachers, parents and experts; examined state and national laws and policies; and reviewed thousands of pages of police reports and court records. The records included Florida’s new risk protection orders, created by the Legislature after the Parkland shooting to keep guns away from dangerous people. Most counties had never released the records before.
In only 18 months, more than 100 unstable and potentially dangerous students across Florida have threatened to kill their teachers, classmates or themselves, records from 10 major counties show. Nearly half of the youths had histories of mental disorders, and more than half had access to guns.
The Sun Sentinel also emailed teachers in the Broward public school system, the nation’s sixthlargest school district, asking them to talk privately, if necessary, about what is happening in their classrooms. Many did.
“Students with violent tendencies have more rights than the students that they endanger. Just ask Nikolas Cruz,” one schoolteacher told the Sun Sentinel.
The same laws that protect disabled students make it difficult for schools to remove a student like the profoundly disturbed Cruz, who was obsessed with hurting others before he killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland on Feb. 14, 2018.
“You cannot get the child out of the classroom,” former teacher Patrick Jovanov said. “You can get him out of the classroom for a day or two or three, but the child comes back.”
One West Broward High teacher had to get a restraining order against a student who attacked her and only then, she said, was he moved out of her classroom.
Teachers had mounds of evidence that Cruz was bent on violence, but it still took his teachers five months to transfer him from Westglades Middle School to the more therapeutic environment of Cross Creek School for emotionally and behaviorally disabled children, the Sun Sentinel found.
Broward teacher Betsy “Miss B” Budrewicz said the pendulum has swung too far, allowing the rights of the violent few to outweigh the others.
After the Parkland shooting, she was haunted by the thought of a student in one of her elementary classes several years ago.
He obsessed over a girl in class, staring at her, demanding her attention, tormenting her if she withheld it. Taken out of the classroom one day, the boy cried and screamed the little girl’s name over and over, throwing himself against the classroom door repeatedly, the teacher remembered.
The girl’s mother had no idea her daughter was being terrorized. Because of the student’s federally protected privacy rights, Budrewicz’s bosses cautioned her not to tell the mother — a warning she ultimately defied. The mom cried and thanked her and removed her daughter from the class the next day, she said.
Budrewicz believed the boy belonged in a special therapeutic school. He hit her and threatened to murder his classmates and to shoot the teacher’s aide.
She submitted five disciplinary referrals, flagging the child’s extreme behavior to school administrators, hoping to start the necessary documentation to move him. But the referrals went nowhere, she said.
“I tried to wave a flag,” she said. If something ends up happening, “I’m going to feel a little to blame.”
Clearing the classroom
Schools are dealing with more students labeled with behavioral conditions than ever, the Sun Sentinel found.
One in five adolescents has had a serious mental health disorder at some point in life, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The case files of Florida’s most troubled kids show what they’re enduring as they head to school each day. One boy said he was living with his father in a neighbor’s shed. Another said his brother was found hanging from a tree.
Educators now believe that childhood trauma can trigger intense anxiety in kids, or “toxic stress” that can lead to mental illness.
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, behavior problems, anxiety and depression are the most commonly diagnosed mental disorders in children, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states. The number of children diagnosed with ADHD has been on the rise over the past two decades. Of those, nearly two-thirds have been diagnosed with an additional mental, emotional or behavioral disorder, according to a 2016 CDC parent survey.
If a student with one or more disorders has a meltdown, teachers are limited in how they can react. They must interrupt everyone else’s education and evacuate the classroom while a disturbed student rages out of control.
Restraining or isolating a disorderly student is frowned upon and tracked by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.
One student’s behavior plan, contained in a 2016 court order obtained by the Sun Sentinel, instructed teachers to clear the room “quickly and quietly so as not to give [the student] any attention.” The teachers were advised to protect valuables and “do not attempt to convince [the student] to follow the rules.”
The law does allow students to be transferred to schools that specialize in emotional and behavioral problems, but it is a final option after all else fails, the Sun Sentinel found.
Not all children can succeed in general education classrooms; educators know this, but the student can remain there for months while the documentation for removal is built.
First, the school must conduct a behavior assessment and create and use a behavior intervention plan. Then, according to the state Department of Education, the red tape unfolds:
“In addition, it would be expected that a student being considered for removal from a general education classroom would have been involved with a multi-tiered system of supports utilizing data-based planning and problem solving, matched to student learning needs. Review of interventions enacted, fidelity checks conducted and data obtained during the use of these supports should also be considered in any potential instructional and placement planning.”
For students with disabilities, any change in school must be agreed upon by a committee that includes the parents. Such students also can’t be disciplined like the general population, especially if the misbehavior is found to be an expression of the disability. Special education students can’t be suspended without schooling for more than 10 days a year.
Cruz was suspended as many as 18 times in one school year, according to a consultant’s report for the school system, but he was provided schooling on most of those days.
Months can pass while teachers fill out forms and accumulate data to justify a transfer to a special, therapeutic school: Did the student threaten to kill anyone today? Did the student disrupt class by screaming obscenities? Knock furniture over? Escape from the classroom without permission? Tear up a classmate’s homework? Shove someone in the hallway?
“Sometimes it’s a very long and arduous process to get a child placed where you need him to be,” said Beverly Slough, a school board member in St. Johns County in northern Florida. “It’s just a different world in teaching today. It’s hard, hard, hard work.”
Florida lawmakers made it even harder.
A 2013 law gave parents veto power over moving a child to a separate, therapeutic school. If the parent says no, the child can stay put while the district fights the parents in a state hearing.
In a 2016 Palm Beach County case, for example, a student with “poor anger control” who would kick and hit staff and peers was recommended for transfer to a special school with classes of three to eight students, with a behavior technician and aides. The parents didn’t agree.
Records in the case show that the student attacked and disrupted other students at public school for more than an entire school year before the district won approval for a permanent transfer.
In that time, the student, during one of many tantrums, overturned a table with attached benches, breaking a student’s leg.
Only then was the district able to remove the student from the school, and only for 45 days, under federal law.
The law allows such a move for students with a disability who bring a weapon to school or commit serious bodily injury, but lawyers fight over the meaning of “serious.” Most threats and assaults don’t qualify.
A special-needs kid who threatens to shoot up a school, for example, commits no serious bodily injury in the eyes of the law, said Weatherly, the attorney.
Breaking another child’s nose did not qualify as serious bodily injury in the judgment of a Pennsylvania court, which said the Pocono Mountain School District in 2008 was not justified in removing the child to an alternative educational setting.
Judges have found that taking action requires extreme physical pain, obvious disfigurement or loss of limb, organ or mental faculties.
Florida legislators weren’t thinking of violent students when they passed the 2013 law, unanimously.
It was pushed by the wife and daughter of two powerful state lawmakers, both now out of office: Sen. Andy Gardiner of Orlando, who has a young son with Down syndrome, and Sen. John Thrasher, who has a grandchild with the syndrome.
Thrasher, who is now president of Florida State University, said he meant to empower parents, not to handcuff teachers and stop them from removing dangerous students. He said he would not oppose legislators’ re-examining the law.
“If someone thinks it’s blocking schools from removing violent, disruptive kids, then certainly, it ought to be looked at,” he said.
The first consideration for all parents, he noted, is the safety of their kids, “and rightly so.”
“Safety and learning go hand in hand,” he said.
At the same time, he said, children with disabilities are entitled to an education. They have a right to learn.
“My grandson is doing remarkably well,” Thrasher said.“He’s wellliked and loved by other kids at the school.”
Teachers victimized
Certainly, most disabled students are not a danger, but violence in the
“Sometimes it’s a very long and arduous process to get a child placed where you need him to be. It’s just a different world in teaching today. It’s hard, hard, hard work.”
Beverly Slough, a school board member in St. Johns County in northern Florida
classroom has reached a new peak, in the view of Anna Fusco, president of the Broward Teachers Union.
Teachers with years of experience say they’ve never seen the kind of “meltdowns” they’re seeing now. No one’s sure what’s behind it: food additives, environmental toxins, violent video games, trauma?
Children with behavioral and emotional difficulties have been mainstreamed in general education for decades, Fusco noted. But only in recent years has violence become prevalent. Most of the time, but not always, she said, the violent student has “some type of label” under special education.
“The meltdowns are becoming extreme,” she said. “Now it’s total destruction of a classroom.”
Earlier this year, the Broward Teachers Union surveyed its members about school safety and released a disconcerting report, summarizing the anonymous responses of 1,884 educators.
Half said they had feared for their safety in the past year. 57% said violence disrupts the school day multiple times a day.
Inside the classrooms, teachers reported being stabbed with pencils or scissors. They’ve been struck with desks, chairs, fruit and water bottles. Students spit in their faces or mouths, or their coffee.
“I’ve had to clear my classroom multiple times because of dangerous situations to myself and the other students in the room,” one teacher wrote. “I spent my year trying to keep students from hurting others and disciplining, that I couldn’t get through a lesson. … I spent my days writing daily notes, keeping data, and writing almost 40 [discipline] referrals. … Students had to put up with the abuse of other kids. No child should have to come to school and deal with that. It makes me terribly sad.”
At one middle school, a child repeatedly “screams, yells, curses at teachers.” “She flips over desks. She took her long fingernails and scratched up a teacher’s face while pushing him in the doorway,” the survey states. “He wrote a report and submitted it to the police officer and administration. She got suspended for three days and returned to his classroom when he asked that she be removed permanently.”
Over a five-year period, Broward’s teachers, school bus drivers and other employees reported 3,914 injuries caused by students — or four per school day on average, according to data released by the school district in response to a public records request from the Sun Sentinel.
“Punched by student in the back of the head, near neck,” one claim states. “Complaints of visual disturbances, headache and neck pain.”
Employees reported being shoved, bitten, slapped and kicked.
One “acting out student” pushed an educator’s neck into a window ledge.
Educators told the Sun Sentinel that if they complain, their bosses sometimes blame them for not controlling the child.
An elementary school principal in Tamarac got into trouble this year when she called on the school deputy to help control and discipline a special needs child, records show.
“As the principal, it is your responsibility to handle behavior and discipline. This is not the role of the [School Resource Officer],” a warning to the principal states. She was suspended for five days for her handling of the incident.
Broward Schools Superintendent Robert Runcie declined to be interviewed for this report. His chief communications officer, Katherine Koch, would respond to questions only by email.
Asked how the district could improve circumstances for potentially violent students and their classmates, she replied: “Our approach is case management for a holistic understanding of what is needed for the student and the community. What is most needed is better funding and resource alignment to enable more personnel to provide intervention and support services to students and families both in and outside of the school day.”
In a letter to Fusco, Runcie pledged that every incidence of violence would be investigated. He said the school district “will not tolerate violent behavior in any form in our schools.”
Runcie created a “Task Force on Student Behavior, Classroom Management and Teacher Safety” and said in August that it would report its findings within four months of beginning work.
On Dec. 3, four months later, the task force met for the first time.
Heaps of red tape
On paper, the 1975 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act — or IDEA — expresses what most people hold dear: Every child in America deserves a decent public education, even if there’s something different about them.
The utopian classroom would nurture students of all abilities, under the law’s vision. A child with emotional outbursts would attract help at a young age, and through therapies, the root cause would be addressed.
But the reality is far from the dream.
General education teachers have some special education training, but they’re not all equipped to deal with the growing numbers of children with deep emotional and behavioral problems.
As in most states, teachers in Florida aren’t required to carry special education certifications. Florida requires one brief college course in exceptional student education every five years to renew a teaching certificate, according to the state Department of Education.
Special education is a “critical shortage” area for teachers in Florida, according to the Florida Department of Education. Just 11% of Florida teachers are certified in special education, the agency’s latest statistics show. Yet most Florida teachers have special education students in their classrooms.
In Broward County, for example, more than 80% of the general education teachers have one or more special education students in class, Broward schools Chief Academic Officer Daniel Gohl testified to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Public Safety Commission in June.
Florida’s need for school psychologists, social workers and family therapists is dire.
Statewide, mental health professionals have exceptionally high caseloads, far above the recommended ratios. A school social worker in Florida, for example, is responsible for 2,377 kids on average, rather than the recommended 250. That’s nearly 10 times the suggested caseload. The Broward school district alone estimates it needs 2,395 more guidance counselors, social workers, family therapists and school psychologists, at a cost of over $192 million.
As of November, the district also was seeking more than 100 speech pathologists to assess and treat students who have problems communicating. Experts say many children with disabilities act out aggressively when they can’t convey their needs or feelings.
Since the Parkland massacre, the school district has partnered with outside mental health providers to assist students and has increased behavioral and wellness training for its employees, so they can help children learn coping strategies.
Lisa Maxwell, executive director of the Broward Principals’ and Assistants’ Association, said in an interview that violent students need a full-time aide or psychologist or psychiatrist with them all day.
“If we’re not going to provide the schools with adequate resources to protect everybody else in the school,” she said, “then my answer is they shouldn’t be there. They should not be there.”
A decade ago, 511 students went to three special-needs schools in Broward for children with emotional and behavioral disabilities. Then Runcie’s administration closed one of them, Sunset School in Fort Lauderdale. Now about 350 kids attend the remaining two schools.
Jamison Jessup, an Orange city professional in behavior analysis, said that if schools had highly trained staff who approached misbehavior with scientifically proven techniques, students with behavioral disorders could make it in general classrooms. Some people resist such modern approaches, resting on ideas from decades ago, he said.
“People say, ‘Bust the kid’s butt,’ ” he said. “The problem is that doesn’t work.”
Fresh look at IDEA
Even in an era of school shootings, talk of placing violent, disabled students in special schools can draw immediate rebuke.
It was not long ago that disabled children were isolated and abused.
“Kids with emotional behavioral disorders were routinely excluded and placed in settings where they had no contact with other kids,” said Peter Leone, a professor in behavior disorders at the University of Maryland. “They often didn’t have access to sports activities” and other electives.
That changed with the passage of IDEA. The law does not require that every student be mainstreamed into a regular classroom, but that must be the first consideration. Florida’s goal is for 85% of disabled students to spend most of their school day around non-disabled peers.
The federal law works, if carried out correctly, said Denise Marshall, executive director of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, a nonprofit group that advances the rights of disabled people. The law envisions “looking at every child as having the ability to succeed,” if given the proper support, she said.
In its 44 years, though, IDEA has never been fully funded by Congress. Educating a special needs student costs double, on average. The federal government, which was supposed to pay 40% of that extra cost, this year
“She just said, ‘Mom, I can’t learn in the classroom when there’s kids throwing things and saying horrible things to a teacher and no one’s doing anything about it.’”
Lisa Valko,
who removed her daughter from public school to online learning, transfering to a private school in the future
picked up just 14.7% of the estimated $13.4 billion full funding.
That leaves schools wanting, and without the money to back it, the law is impossible to carry out properly, advocates acknowledge.
“It’s well documented that schools do not have enough counselors, do not have enough nurses, do not have enough staff, that class sizes are large,” Marshall said. “All of these things are barriers to providing an excellent education to students.”
The federal government this year surveyed local school districts to find out how IDEA is being carried out. It’s unclear what, if anything, the federal government might change.
Given the lack of funding and the increasing violence, some say it’s time to reevaluate the law.
A teacher for 44 years, Theresa Bennett began a crusade for the removal of violent students even before what happened in Parkland. The shooting, she thinks, should prompt a new look at the 1970s era law — similar to how the 9⁄11 terrorist attacks prompted a new look at air travel.
“Whoever thought someone would fly a plane into the World Trade Center? It’s the same thing with IDEA,” she reasoned.“Who imagined?”
In May, Bennett wrote to Florida Department of Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran about her belief that the law is misapplied. “I am a teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School,” she began. “I do not believe I need further introduction.”
Bennett was afraid of a very large, volatile student in her 2017 senior class. She was told nothing could be done to remove him, because he had an emotional and behavioral disability.
But her fears were justified. Shortly after the teen quit school, he was arrested after walking naked up the beach from Deerfield Beach to Boca Raton, and then breaking down a stranger’s door, bashing him over the head with a vase and wrestling him to the ground, the police report says. He was found guilty and sentenced to five years of probation.
Give them a treat
Even students who cuss out the teacher, run out of the classroom or torment classmates aren’t always disciplined, the Sun Sentinel found.
If the student has a special education label, a pattern of misbehavior prompts a “positive behavior intervention plan,” under which some students with the worst behaviors are bribed with treats. Cruz’s teachers were told to be sure to praise him every five minutes, his school records show.
One teacher said a disruptive child in his class got McDonald’s meals with the principal if he behaved.
Teachers find themselves improvising to handle children with disorders they’ve never heard of. A Duval County teacher bought a rocking chair for a disturbed kindergartner who regularly attacked other students, so the boy wouldn’t have to sit still. He’d been diagnosed with Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder, a diagnosis first recognized in 2013 and characterized by extreme irritability and intense temper outbursts. The teacher didn’t know what that was or how to handle it, a federal lawsuit alleging a lack of appropriate services for him says.
In a social studies class in Broward, another teacher came up with an innovative way to handle a disruptive kid.
Roberto Fernandez III set up a “runway” for a student with ADHD who fidgeted in his desk. He could get up and pace in his “walking lane,” and other students wouldn’t be distracted.
Most kids just need accommodations for their differences, said Fernandez, who taught at Boyd Anderson High in Fort Lauderdale and now teaches at Plantation High. The restless teen went on to college, Fernandez said.
Another student at his high school, however, talked about white supremacist propaganda and told a female math teacher he was interested in raping a woman, to “know what it would be like to have that kind of power,” Fernandez recalled. That’s not someone he’d like sitting next to his daughter in class.
“I understand where teachers are coming from,” he said, of their fear of some students. Especially now. “Since Parkland, there’s an innocence that has been lost.”
No longer is it clear who should remain in the general classroom — and who should not.
Many parents reject the idea of sending their child to a school for disabled students.
Leigh Townley took a different position. She removed her daughter from regular school to place her in Whispering Pines Center, a special school in Miramar designed for students with emotional and behavioral problems.
Her daughter wasn’t violent, but she had inappropriate behaviors and felt uncomfortable in school.
Townley, a teacher at The Quest Center, a school in Hollywood for disabled students, said she knew a special school would be familiar with how to smoothly handle students like her daughter, with highly trained teachers and counselors at the ready.
“She’s happier now, because she has friends,” Townley said. “And honestly, they’ve given her the tools we think she needs where she’s learned to cope with her behaviors.”
Student exodus
Other parents are fleeing the public schools, sending their children to private or charter schools where violent students aren’t welcome, data shows.
Across Florida, the number of kids in charter schools has soared from over 137,000 a decade ago to roughly
313,500, according to the state. Enrollment in private schools statewide has jumped in that time by about 67,000 students.
Broward’s traditional public school enrollment is at 221,266, its lowest in
18 school years, district figures show. Meanwhile, charter school enrollment in Broward has increased.
Safety concerns were a top reason cited by parents leaving the traditional public schools in Broward, according to a parent survey released by the Broward schools in April.
Lisa Valko said removing her daughter was an easy decision.
Valko said she’ll never forget the text message from her son during the Parkland shooting. He was in the
1200 Building where 17 people died, and he was hiding. He told her goodbye and that “he loved his sisters and his father very much.”
She rethought her children’s schooling. School discipline in the public system seemed too lax, and
her daughter felt unsafe, Valko said. Students mouthed off to teachers and disrupted classes. She took her daughter out of Westglades Middle in September. For now, the girl is learning online and will transfer to private school.
“She just said, ‘Mom, I can’t learn in the classroom when there’s kids throwing things and saying horrible things to a teacher and no one’s doing anything about it,’“Valko said.
System is broken
The broken system creates children with grievances, some advocates maintain.
“We’ve seen white teenage males who’ve been lost, who fell through the cracks and did not get the services and supports they need and felt angry and isolated about it,” said Marshall, at the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates. “That’s what we need to change.”
Max Schachter, whose 14-year-old son Alex was shot and killed by Cruz, asked the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Commission in June why Cruz was separated from the therapeutic bandage of services he needed.
“Our children should not have to be in the same classroom,” he said. “You cannot prioritize the rights of this one violent individual to the detriment of every other person around him.”
Cruz had ADHD and was obsessive compulsive. He was suspected by medical professionals to have autism. He scored a 77 — below average — on an IQ test.
“Why did you send the murderer to Marjory Stoneman Douglas when you knew that every time he had been mainstreamed, he was a disciplinary nightmare?”
Max Schachter, whose 14-year-old son Alex was shot and killed by the Parkland shooter
In middle school, he scored in the 97th percentile, or “very elevated,” for potential violence, the Sun Sentinel learned. He was emotionally handicapped, language-impaired and obsessed with guns, his records say.
“Why did you send the murderer to Marjory Stoneman Douglas when you knew that every time he had been mainstreamed, he was a disciplinary nightmare?” Schachter asked.
By all accounts, Cruz thrived at Cross Creek School in Pompano Beach, one of two Broward public schools for children with severe emotional and behavioral disorders. There were no more than 10 kids in a class and a psychiatrist on staff, as well as therapists, counselors and a nurse who ensured students took their medications, Schachter said.
But Cruz didn’t want to stay in a special ed school. He wanted to attend Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland instead, and his mother supported the move. Because of disability laws, the school district allowed it.
He crumbled. He attempted suicide; he was failing his classes. He got into a fight on campus. He threatened to rape and kill another student.
School officials misled Cruz into giving up his special education status, records show. Then they pressured him to withdraw.
He came back a year later with an AR-15.