Reply to Teacher shot at Newport News elementary school

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Will the parents of the classmates who witnessed this sue the school system for not taking previous incidents seriously? [/quote]

I hope so.  I hope every family and every staff member sues the district.  I'd do it for the inevitable PTSD.  I'm unsure, to be honest, how they expect staff or students to return.
[b]
Teachers, here's a piece of advice for you if you haven't already been doing this.  When you have a student with serious behavioral or emotional issues, keep records of your communications with administration and the "team" (usually made up of the sped teacher, the psych, the social worker, etc) who help to determine what supports a child gets.  Keep records of every email.  Follow up every verbal communication with a "recap" email stating what was said.  Keep track of every time some staff or admin on "the team" tells you how to handle situations.  Keep track of what they do and do not do. Keep track of what parents say and do, too. You may need it in court some day.  [/b]

But most of all, I encourage every single staff member to FIGHT for what you and your students need.  I have made myself absolutely obnoxious these past few years on behalf of my students and my colleagues.  I'm an older teacher and maybe I just don't care anymore what admins think.  We teachers have to start demanding 1:1 aides for some of these kids while we wait for evals to happen.  Go to your union (if you have one).  Band together as a grade level and go to your superintendent.  Go to board meetings and speak up.  Complain until they give you what you need just to make you go away.  Best of all, get on your contract negotiations team if you can and fight for help in your contract.  Go on strike if they won't help.  Organize.  Go to the state board of ed and complain.  Maybe we teachers need to hire legal representation to amend the IDEA.  I don't know, but if we keep doing what we've always done (complaining over drinks, crying in our cars on the way to school, taking a lot of sick days just to get through the year, etc) nothing will change.[/quote]

Agree to all of this but especially the bolded. At the end of the day, the school district dgaf if you’re safe or happy or regularly being threatened by some unhinged kid or their parent. Put ALL of it in writing and back it up on your personal home computer. It’s hard for your district to “loose” the emails where a student was threatening to cut your breasts off and trying to figure out where your younger two attended preschool if you have a copy stored that your own cloud account.[/quote]

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