For background, I have been a teacher for 27 years. I started out as a substitute teacher. I’ve taught middle school and now I’m currently teaching high school. My daughter is also going into high school education and she’s in the second year of her degree program.
I started my career teaching in the classroom full-time the year columbine happened and ever since gun violence has gotten worse. As a teacher, I do not truly in my heart believe it is the guns and the NRA and all the things that people say is causing school violence. I believe it is a problem with our IEP system. It is a problem with not holding parents accountable it’s a problem with not holding students accountable and it’s a problem with not having support in our society for mental health issues that students might have. So often you hear of a student going in and shooting their school and then you find out that the student had a mental health issue or they were a student on an IEP and students and IEP. Students and parents of kids on IEP know that their student Cannot get expelled or suspended because it’s a manifestation often times of their disability. That is what needs to go away is a manifestation of their disability often times parents and students and administrators hide behind that as a way to bring these kids and keep them in school. Our society or our system of education needs to have online schools or schools for students who get accused of, creating violence against our school or promoting it.
I have experienced. This is a parent and a teacher. My daughter in eighth grade was removed because there was a student who brought bomb material to their school and had the students not used the safe to tell and had not gone down to the main office to tell them it would’ve been an entirely tragic day. as a teacher, I had a student who took a Glock that looked real, but was an airsoft gun to the middle school. He threatened an eighth grader that he’s going to kill him. Then the student got suspended for one day because he’s on an IEP and it was a manifestation of its disability. Then he made a threat to me in the classroom. I went to the counselor and said get him out of my room. She then went on to say he’s not a threat don’t you worry. So I went on to say to her if he harm me kills me, shoots me anything, my husband will personally sue you to the district and on and on. So these are my experiences and this is how I know it’s not the gun. It is the mental health and it is IEP system and it is individual student and lack accountability on them in the parents.
I am proposing for a policy that parents are held accountable with either jail time counseling whatever. Student is suspended expelled from the current school and district and does not become a problem for another school district. There becomes federal schools where the students go in and they learn their education and they get the mental health help they need. we need to become tougher on the mental health and lack of support and help and we need to become tougher on these parents. We need to take out the manifestation of the disability out of an IEP that is unfair to all other students in the school and in the community.
. I think once these kids realize that they cannot come back to their school that they cannot make these threats and that they will go somewhere else away from their peers Violence would probably end.