Report of a massive fight at Clarksburg HS

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03/09/2024 17:53

Subject: Report of a massive fight at Clarksburg HS

Anonymous

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:According to moderately Moco. Says they can’t punish the known problems because their suspension rate is already too high

Do you know who runs Moderately MOCO?

Yeah, might want to figure that out.

RW garbage.

I do, and yes, right-wing, though I expect he's sincere in his belief that HE is the moderate and EVERYONE ELSE is the extremists.

This is why things never seem to improve in our county. Whenever someone brings up serious issues, like violence in schools (which we all know is a real problem), people start name-calling. It just derails the whole conversation and makes it hard to focus on what really matters. We need to stay on topic and have a mature discussion about these issues if we want to make any real progress in solving them.

The county and mcps as well as the county council and boe are too worried about being woke than they are about safety.

I doubt that's true.

I'm not in that area, but I am fairly aware of issues going on in schools today and what's driving the choices of school boards and superintendents and principals etc.

I've posted elsewhere on the board - and was a bit smug a few months back - about being an attorney who was used to high stress and working 70-80 hour weeks on average and more during weeks I was in trial or trial prep. I'd been planning to apply to Teach for America as a midlife career changer and I felt confident that I would be up to the task because there was very little I hadn't seen in my years working as a domestic violence advocate, legal aid attorney, public defender and prosecutor.

Then I took a job working at a before/after school program at the YMCA so I could get some time working with kids ahead of starting this TFA thing in the summer. And WOW. I had NO IDEA what kids in school are like today. Some of them are wonderful, but a good 10-15% are FERAL. They are physically assaultive toward adult teachers, they curse like sailors, they call us pedophiles, they make it their mission to disrupt the entire classroom and try to antagonize staff endlessly. AND THERE IS NOTHING WE CAN DO ABOUT IT. We write them up and give those incident reports to parents who don't care. We threaten to suspend them for a day or two and that threat goes to a parent who doesn't care. We threaten to bar them from summer camp and all the fun activities and they just don't care because they know there is little likelihood that threat will be followed through.

The school bus company is desperate for drivers because they keep quitting over the feral behavior of kids on the bus, and the zero consequences that come of reporting it.

Why are there no consequences? I did research on the school district where I would be teaching if I did TFA - they were sued a decade ago by the ACLU and federal OCR because they were issuing too many in school and out of school suspensions and a fairly high percentage were kids who were BIPOC. They found no evidence that the school district's discipline policies were racially biased, but since the result of applying them was that more BIPOC kids were getting suspended from school, they sued anyway. And the school district was cowed and rewrote the disciplinary guidelines and now the suspension rates have fallen substantially and the misbehavior is off the charts.

During school vacation week I worked full days - no lesson planning, no grading, no contact with parents and such, just trying to manage and entertain a classroom full of kids for a full day. I nearly pissed my pants several times waiting for relief to use the toilet. I didn't get any lunches or breaks of any kind. I went home dead tired every evening and was in bed asleep by 8:30 only to get up at the buttcrack of dawn to do it all over again. The kids screamed at me, called me names, kicked and shoved me - and I'm working with kindergartners so it's not nearly as bad as the staff working with MS kids. From what I'm hearing from the trenches, I would NEVER put my physical safety at risk to work with HS kids.

I sympathize with teachers. When I was an attorney in the trenches of the criminal justice system, I worked very long hours and didn't get vacation weeks off at holidays and in summer, but I didn't work as hard either. I was shown respect by most everyone I interacted with, including hardened criminal defendants. I wasn't screamed at and called names. I got a lunch break and bathroom breaks when I needed them. I interacted mostly with other responsible adults. It could be very stressful at times, mostly because I'm a perfectionist and had a very hard time letting go of thinking about my caseload and the parties to the cases so work was on my mind 24/7. But it wasn't anything like the exhaustion level I feel after dealing with a classroom of kids all day and trying to manage the future criminals and deadbeats in the class. I doubt very much at midlife I would have the energy to do 8 hours of that and then go home for the second shift of lesson planning, grading and contacting parents.

Bless the folks who are sticking it out. I think the posters here criticizing teachers are full of poop.

Hello! I remember you. We argued a bit back and forth. (I think I was warning you, hoping you would reach out to existing teachers before making the jump.)

Thank you for this extremely gracious and informative post. You are helping teachers simply by posting it, because you are providing insight into what we deal with each day.

I’ll probably be leaving the profession soon since I just can’t do this anymore. I’m not sure where I’m heading, so come back and post if you have any employment ideas for a former teacher!

As another career switcher this is the hardest job. I have worked in a variety of fields. The poster you replied to gets it! Some are literary feral children who will hijack your class and there is not much that can be done with today’s climate, especially at the state level. They are destroying any ability for use to safely manage our classrooms.