Can more discipline stop the rise in Texas school violence?

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“No.”

The simple two-letter word was all it took to set off chaos at Heritage Rose Elementary last week. About a hundred children were sitting cross-legged in a hallway, ready to be dismissed to go home, when pre-K teacher Nadene Casteel saw two boys standing out of place and instructed them to sit with their class.

But one of the boys did not budge. Casteel repeated the order. He refused — his second “no” — and stomped away. When she grabbed his backpack to steer him back, he yanked away with force.

Casteel stumbled and flailed her arms to catch her balance. In the blur of the moment, her limb struck another student’s eye.

That night, Casteel called the boy’s parents to report the incident. The mom was upset with how Casteel handled the situation; by the end of the week, the family had pulled him out of the school.

Casteel has been a teacher for 12 years, five of which she has spent at this school in Fort Bend County. She said she has always been “tough on them with love.” But to her, that afternoon was an example of how students have become increasingly difficult to manage after the pandemic.

Casteel is sure the boy didn’t mean for her or his classmate to get hurt. Since his earliest years in school, she said he would react with anger when adults gave him instructions. Casteel attributes the misbehavior to the gulf between expectations at home during lockdown and those of a more structured school day.

Ever since schools reopened for in-person learning after the pandemic, teachers like Casteel say classrooms have become more difficult to manage. Students are less attentive and more defiant. In some schools, the misconduct has escalated to physical outbursts like throwing chairs, biting and kicking.

That kind of student violence has been increasingly aimed at teachers. More than 3,300 Texas district employees were the target of a student assault in the 2023-24 school year, about a 15% increase from the year before. In one of the most severe incidents, an assistant principal in the Corsicana school district was permanently blinded after an assault.

The classroom tensions are pushing overworked and underpaid educators over the edge, who were already leaving the profession in droves.

Lawmakers are trying to fix the problem with a sweeping package that would give school districts more latitude to discipline disruptive students. They’re also considering other legislation they say would give teachers more tools to manage their classrooms: a ban on cellphones in schools, a ban on minors creating social media and a mandate to get more teachers on the path to certification, which legislators say would give them better classroom management skills.

But some educators say harsher discipline won’t tackle the root causes of students’ behavioral challenges. They say schools need more mental health professionals to help students who act out develop the social and emotional skills they missed out on during the pandemic. They worry heavy-handed discipline will derail students’ education at a time when they need extra support.

Pandemic babies miss out

The hike in disruptions is the long tail of remote instruction and isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic, experts say. The littlest students, in particular, missed out on face-to-face time with others right when their brains were developing. Some of them had never been to a birthday party or to Walmart with their parents when schools reopened.

“We have these kids who basically were born during the height of the pandemic,” said Christy Chapman, a school psychologist in West Texas. “They were growing up at home with literally no social interaction except from their parents. It really hinders their brain development, their social emotional development.”

Remote school came with unstructured free time. Most students didn’t have to focus on schoolwork for long stretches of time. They didn’t practice social skills like asking for help in a group setting, which children pick up from being around other kids.

When students finally returned to in-person learning, COVID-19 was still ravaging the state. Teachers and students wore masks, an effective tool at slowing the spread of the virus. But the face coverings meant children never learned how to read facial expressions, making it harder to connect with and respond to others, said Chapman, who consults with local school districts on student misbehavior and trains school staff like diagnosticians and teachers at Texas Tech University.

“So then we’re asking you to come into a classroom, to sit in a chair, know how to interact with people, know how to walk down the hallway … they have a really hard time,” Chapman said. “Then we start to see this uptick in behavioral problems.”

In the classroom, teachers like Coretta Mallet-Fontenot have found themselves explaining over and over again to their students how they expect them to behave. Setting rules and expectations help teachers create order so that learning can happen. But Mallet-Fontenot said her students had gotten accustomed to the looser structure of remote instruction.

“You can’t just get up and leave when you feel like it. You can’t take a phone call in the middle of class like you did if you were at home,” said Mallet-Fontenot, who taught at Houston ISD before leaving the profession last fall. “A lot of times, they didn’t understand why that was inappropriate and how that was disruptive to the [in-person] learning environment.”

Children also got more attached to their phones during the pandemic. Scrolling through TikTok and playing Minecraft became bridges to social interaction during quarantine. According to one analysis from Kaiser Permanente, children spent nearly two more hours a day in front of screens during the pandemic, bringing their total daily screen time to more than six hours. It did not go back down much after students returned to classrooms.

“That dopamine hit is really not good for a child’s brain,” Amanda Hail, a school psychologist at Lindale ISD in East Texas, who has started to ask parents about their kids’ screen time.

Research links excessive screen time to overstimulation, poor focus, increased aggression and a depletion of mental energy, all of which can trigger a student to act out. Screen time also comes at the expense of time for physical activity and social interaction, both of which help children regulate their emotions.

The increased dependence on screen time and the underdevelopment of social and emotional skills are straining student well-being. It’s happening at the same time students are still reeling from losing loved ones during the pandemic, which hit Black and Hispanic communities in Texas harder.

Young people today are experiencing higher rates of depression and anxiety. Some are thinking about suicide.

But as student needs have risen, the Texas teacher workforce — and educators’ ability to respond to disruptions — has dwindled.

A strain on teachers

Teachers are often the first to notice the impact of the pandemic on children — and have few resources to help them.

Their working conditions worsened at the start of the pandemic, and have only continued to deteriorate in the aftermath. Low pay, burnout and not enough support to build out lesson plans have led many educators to leave the profession.

To fill the gaps created by teacher vacancies, school districts have increasingly turned to hiring uncertified teachers, many of whom have little or no formal training in managing classrooms. The result is a vicious cycle that destabilizes school environments: Underprepared educators struggle to maintain order, which fuels more student misbehavior, which in turn makes it even harder for teachers to control their classrooms.

Teacher preparation advocates say certification programs give educators the tools to manage disruptions and help students thrive. One analysis from the Texas Education Agency found Texas schools with higher rates of uncertified teachers were also more likely to have higher rates of student discipline infractions.

Casteel, the Heritage Rose Elementary teacher, did get certified — but not through a traditional path. She completed an alternative certification program, a fast-track route that has become increasingly common in schools but offers lower-quality training.

Casteel said she didn’t feel the certification program she took prepared her well to deal with misbehaving students.

“What these kids are going through…the trauma, the home life, I’m not equipped to deal with that. I don’t have those skills. I haven’t been taught that,” Casteel said. “I’m flying by the seat of my pants, doing what’s worked in the past, not knowing, honestly, if it’s even what’s best for the kids.”

 Is discipline enough?

Texas lawmakers’ pitch to solve the unprecedented disarray in classrooms is to give schools more latitude to discipline disruptive students.

“Kids are going to be kids, but I will tell you that it is not compassionate for kids not to have consequences,” Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Plano, said last month on the House floor during a heated debate on student discipline. “For a student that comes into a classroom and threatens a teacher … again and again and again … the compassionate and merciful thing to do is to punish them.”

House Bill 6, authored by Leach, would allow schools to place students in in-school suspensions for longer periods of time. The proposal would also allow schools to use out-of-school suspensions — which remove children from school grounds — for any student who has repeatedly disrupted their class or endangered other kids’ safety. That would reverse state laws from 2017 and 2019 that limited when and how the state’s youngest students can be disciplined.

HB 6 also proposes how to discipline students who assault teachers. Any student who does so would be taken out of the classroom for at least 30 days and placed in an alternative education setting, a strict environment that often leans on computer-based work and is in a different building.

Teachers, school psychologists and district leaders agree that removing aggressive students from the classroom is sometimes necessary to keep other students safe, make teachers’ jobs easier and allow learning to continue.

“If you have ever been [with] a student in a chaotic situation, how can you learn?” said Gerald Hudson, the superintendent of the Cedar Hill school district, near Dallas. “If you don’t feel safe, you can’t learn.”

But if disruptive behavior is, at its root, a call for help or connection, some educators wonder: Can discipline alone meet those needs? After students are taken out of a classroom, what does it take to change their behavior?

Zeph Capo, president of the Texas American Federation of Teachers, said schools have a dual responsibility to not only protect educators and all students in the classroom, but also identify why disruptive students are acting out. Without proper intervention, he warned, discipline only delays disruptions.

“That might, short term, make some people feel better,” Capo said. “But you and I both know that those kids are going to be coming back to somebody’s classroom somewhere at some point.”

Research shows suspensions and expulsions are mostly ineffective at improving student behavior. In fact, discipline can make students feel disconnected from their schools and push them to skip class or drop out.

“There’s really a mismatch…I don’t think that these bills, unfortunately, are going to address any of the classroom disruption that’s going on,” said Renuka Rege, an attorney at Texas Appleseed, a group that calls for schools to end contact with the criminal legal system. “The likelihood that they would repeat the same behavior once they come back is even greater, especially if they continue to be repeatedly suspended.”

Texas lawmakers are also considering other bills that aim to give teachers more tools to mitigate and manage disruption. Rep. Caroline Fairly, R-Amarillo, the only Gen Z lawmaker in the state Capitol, is shepherding a ban on cellphones in school.

And a massive school finance package, which is being negotiated between the two chambers, currently includes a requirement for teachers in foundational courses to get certified. Earlier versions of the bill proposed a financial incentive to help educators without formal training pay the costs of enrolling in a high-quality preparation program, like teacher residencies, but it’s unclear whether such a provision will be included in the final legislation.

When his students act out, Cypress-Fairbanks ISD English teacher Jeremy Eugene said he exhausts the tools at his disposal before reaching out to school administrators for help.

But escalating the situation often means removing students from their classrooms, which Eugene said can leave him wondering if he should have kept on looking for a solution on his own.

“A lot of people might see the referrals [out] as the first option. But it does become a kind of a scapegoat for not creating a better solution,” Eugene said.

He’d like to see legislation that helps schools expand their mental health services to meet the pandemic-related trauma he sees his students trying to bounce back from.

Counselors, social workers, nurses and psychologists can be critical in helping students who are struggling with their mental health. But Texas schools rarely meet the recommended student-to-provider ratios. Heritage Rose Elementary School, where Casteel teaches, has only two counselors for about 1,200 students.

Casteel believes disruptive students would benefit from small-group settings where teachers can provide individualized attention to students and dedicate class time to teaching them social-emotional skills.

To her, the efforts at the Capitol are a good start but fall short.

“It’s more nuanced than just ‘don’t kick them out or do kick them out,’” Casteel said. “But honestly, I’m not sure in Texas we’ll ever get what we really need for these students.”

Disclosure: Texas Appleseed and Texas Tech University have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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