According to data taken from the US Department of Education, Wisconsin and Minnesota both lag behind the rest of the nation in terms of teacher safety. In Minnesota around six percent of teacher reported being attacked by students in the school year from 2011 to 2012. From the most recent year with data, Wisconsin reported that they had experienced 11.3 percent of teachers having been physically abused by student. That is the highest percentage in the Nation, and Minnesota ranked in ninth out of the 25 states that had adequate data for comparison.
On a national scale, the attacks stood at around 5.8 percent. This Friday, when a St Paul Central teacher attempted to stop a fight, one of the students turned on him and attacked him. They diagnosed him with a concussion as well as a traumatic brain injury. This attack reignited the interest related to the safety of our educators in the public school system. The teachers of St. Paul have even considered going on strike for the safety of their teachers.
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It stood at eight percent versus three percent. Facing acts of violence are not the only thing that teachers face, however. Around four percent of the teachers in the Minnesota said that they had been threatened with physical violence, which ranks them as 11th out of 44 states. Wisconsin ranked in third with a 13.7 percent rating, and the national average average was at around 10 percent. However, we do not know the full scope of violence in the public school system because there is not always data to support the claims. Local school districts will often collect information based on the number of suspensions, graduation rates and test scores. If the state does not require it, they do not collect it and detailed reports about violence are not
A teacher’s most important duty is to protect the students they are in charge of. This duty includes both reasonably protecting students from harm and, when a student is harmed, reporting it to the proper authorities (Gooden, Eckes, Mead, McNeal, & Torres, 2013, pp. 103-109). There have been many court cases that reiterate this duty of school staff. One such case is Frugis v. Bracigliano (2003) where many staff at a school failed in their duty to protect students and allowed abuse to continue for years.
Everyone knows that parents’ first worry is the safety of their children. With the increase of violence in schools, parents have started to wonder if their children are really safe in the school setting. Shootings like Sandy Hook and Columbine left parents, administrators, and educators feeling the need to be proactive towards children’s safety. Reacting to situations like these is not good enough when children’s lives are on the line. Administration has started to brainstorm different ways to help insure the protection of their students. The idea of having teachers carry concealed weapons has been on the front burner for quite some time. As a result of this extreme idea, insurance companies have started to increase or even cancel policies with schools that have armed teachers because of the high risk they are putting themselves at. Parents and administrators also worry about the idea of children getting their hands on one of the teachers’ weapons and injuring themselves or other students. Because this idea seems quite extreme, I believe there are other alternatives that are less dramatic and more positively out looked, such as having armed security guards in schools.
In “Vulnerable Schools Need Protection: Guns, Training For Teachers may be the answer”, published in a 2008 edition of the Chicago Tribune, David McGrath argues that some teachers should be allowed to carry a concealed weapon for protection. First, McGrath states that if a random psychotic gunman were searching for someplace to attack, his classroom would make an easy target. He feels that if he was trained and armed, his class would not be trapped without a chance of survival because he would be able to defend against the gunman. Sec...
"Arkansas District Arming More than 20 Teachers, Staff." Herald (Everett, WA): n.p. Jul 31, 2013. SIRS Issues Researcher. Web. 4 Oct. 2015.
Yet, as a profession (and a society) maybe a little shock treatment now and then is good for us, especially if we ourselves work in relatively “safe” schools and communities. Maybe it’s time to remind ourselves that one school’s problem can become every school’s problem if the profession at large is not watchful and careful. No school is immune to the potential of extreme violence, as many of us, without meaning to, have learned. If you’re a long-time, veteran English teacher, you may never have thought you’d see the day when an issue of English Journal would be devoted to school violence. The idea never occurred to me, either. But here we are, and here that issue is. And, what’s more, it’s high time. While none of us needs convincing that the violence problem is serious in a great many places, some of the statistics are sobering.
If teachers go through the proper training not only physical but the mental part of it as well. If teachers are gonna carry guns then we need to know that they will be in the right state of mind and will do what needs doing. We can afford any more lives to be taken by students with mental problems or any other problems that causes school shooting, teachers need to find a way to handle the situation without violence before they take a child's life.
More times than not teachers are not properly educated, prepared, or skilled enough to arm the gun and shoot it during high stress crisis. A school teacher, Mrs. Robinson commented, “I’m not sure I could even get to a gun in a drawer or closet to use it. I think my gut instinct would be getting my kids secured first” (CNNMoney). An untrained or barely trained faculty member with a firearm is more of a liability than an asset. The weapon could easily fall out of the hands of a briefly trained teacher and into the hands of the perpetrator. Even annual training is not enough training for a teacher to be skilled enough to handle a firearm. Therefore, it is negligent to supply teachers with minimal training the right to carry a firearm on school
Over the past decade school violence has been on the rise. School violence has always existed in some form or another, whether it is a fight out on the play ground or a stabbing in the parking lot. However nothing got the nation's attentions like the April 20, 1999, Columbine school shooting. Ever since that day the nation wants to know what to do to protect the kids in this country. Many schools have gotten increasingly stricter on their policies, especially the schools that have more money. What about the schools that cant' afford metal detectors and security officers? American public schools are not safe, and need to have greater security measures to ensure the students' safety.
How safe do you feel when you attend school everyday? Many students and faculty don’t really think too much about school being a dangerous place; however, after a couple of school shootings had taken place their minds and thoughts may have changed completely. On April 16, 2007, in the town of Blacksburg Virginia, a college student who attended Virginia Tech, opened gunfire to his fellow classmates. This shooting has been considered to be the biggest massacre in all of American history. There are many things to be discussed in this major tragedy. Some of them include the events leading up to the shooting, the timeline that the shootings occurred, the causes, and the significance in this particular shooting. The Virginia Tech is only one of the several examples of the horrible behavior and violence in our school systems today.
Violence has become the growing problem in the United States today. School violence is the se...
The main premise of this article revolves around the idea of creating a safe classroom. The article discusses students collectively performing a “walkout” to show their disproval of current decisions being made about classroom safety. The article also talks about the recent tragedy in Florida where a student shot and killed multiple kids at school. This was a horrific act and now there is a lot of talk about what needs to be done to ensure kids go to school in a pleasant atmosphere.
Adam Lanza, Eric Harris, and Dylan Klebold are responsible for issues of gun control being a major discussion. At first you may not know who these three men are, but after being told their stories, you will know exactly who they are. Lanza was the man responsible for the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012. Harris and Klebold were the two men who executed a horrendous plan to kill everyone at Columbine High School in April 1999. The discussions of gun control need to go deeper in protecting the schools, at all levels, from intruders impeding with their school day by killing their friends and teachers. There have been too many occurrences of shootings at schools where the weapons are brought on to campus and into the buildings unnoticed. There needs to be more done with security and surveillance at schools of all types; middle schools, elementary schools, and colleges. Although the government claims to have improved the security of the schools, there still needs to be more done to be sure that students and others cannot walk into the school with unnoticed firear...
60% of school shootings in the US happen in small towns. Research on earlier shootings showed the attack is on a school because that is the center stage in a small town, where the shooter can affect the entire community. School shootings are far more frequent in America than in other countries. Although school shootings seem to be on the rise, school is still considered one of the safest places. In 2012 out of all youth homicides, less than 2% occur at school, and this percentage has been stable for the past decade. In 2010, there were about 828,000 nonfatal injuries at school among students 12 to 18 years old. Deaths resulting from schoo...
School shootings are becoming common place in the news as school violence is on the rise. Statistics state that 31.2 percent of parents said the leading cause for choosing homeschool over public school is “concern about the environment of other schools” (Burke, 2014). According to the CDC fact sheet Understanding School Violence, 12 percent of youth in grades 9-12 report being in a physical fight on school property while 5.9 percent reported that they felt unsafe at school and did not attend. Seven percent of teachers also report that they have been threatened or injured by a student (School Violence, 2013). While only 1 percent of all youth homicides occur at schools, violence does not need to result in a fatality in order to be a concern.
Out of the 102 teachers that responded, 62% of those teachers said that they were for teaching gun safety in schools. Of those 62%, about 54% say that they feel that police or trained military personnel should teach these safety classes in the schools.