posted by Jack
Study says…220,000 teachers are assaulted by students every year
When Michelle Andrews (see below) leaned over to talk to a disruptive 6th grader in her class, she says the student struck her in the face, causing Andrews’ neck to snap backwards.
The 2015 incident was scary, and it also caused permanent nerve damage, said Andrews, who had been teaching for six years before the attack. The student was suspended for a week for disrespect toward a teacher—not for assault—and then returned to Andrews’ classroom in Bridgeton, N.J.
When Andrews asked her principal to permanently remove the student from her classroom, she says the principal told her to “put on her big girl panties and deal with it.” Instead, Andrews decided to press charges against the student—a move that she alleges led to her termination from the Bridgeton school district. Andrews sued the school board, claiming she had not been adequately protected after being injured, among other allegations.
She ended up settling for $197,500, but the incident left her shaken and depressed.
“I didn’t know if I even wanted to go back into teaching after all that,” she said. “I felt like I couldn’t trust the system, I couldn’t trust my administrators. I was afraid if something like this happened again, how I would react—fight or flight.”
(For the school district’s part, Superintendent Thomasina Jones said the settlement was reached on the advice of the insurance company, and the district conducts a thorough investigation into every incident of violent student behavior.)
What happened to Andrews isn’t an isolated incident. In the 2015-16 school year, 5.8 percent of the nation’s 3.8 million teachers were physically attacked by a student. Almost 10 percent were threatened with injury, according to federal education data.
Some teachers, like Andrews, may sue after they are attacked, and those lawsuits typically become high-profile news. But for the most part, teacher victimization has been an understudied and underpublicized area, experts say.
“It’s a tough thing to study,” said Dorothy Espelage, a professor of psychology at the University of Florida. “No one wants to talk about that teaching is a hazardous profession, that teachers are at risk when they’re in the classroom.”
While special educators are more frequently at risk because they work with children who might have severe behavioral issues, teachers of all subjects, of all grade levels, and from all types of schools are at risk for violence, Espelage said.
New research offers some insights on the teachers who are being attacked, and what those incidents can mean long term.
A recent study by Francis Huang, an assistant professor in the statistics, measurement, and evaluation in education program at the University of Missouri, analyzed 2011-12 federal education data to see what factors lead to teacher victimization. The analysis excluded special education teachers.
The study, published last year, found that female teachers were more likely to be attacked than male teachers. Teachers in schools with higher percentages of non-white students and higher levels of poverty were more likely to report being threatened or attacked—but Huang said the data didn’t shed any light on the demographics of the students who attack teachers.
Almost 44 percent of teachers who had been the victims of physical assault said the attacks had a negative impact on their job performance, according to a study Moon conducted of 1,600 teachers. Nearly 30 percent said they could no longer trust the student, and 27 percent said they thought of quitting their teaching career afterwards.