this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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You might have had bad teachers and bad admin, true - but more likely, the school can't do anything.
I'm a teacher, and I cannot tell you how incredibly frustrated I am at how tied my hands are. The admin can't do much, either.
My options: talk sternly to the student. Talk sternly to the parent/guardians. And... that's it.
Send them to the office? Sure. The principal also has those two options, for the most part. Suspending students is something we only do in very rare circumstances, but they really, really try to avoid it, because so often, kids are acting out because of stuff at home, so suspending them only makes the behaviour worse.
We can't do detentions after school or on weekends - we can't force parents to bring their kids in then. Lunch hour detentions, we can't afford dedicated staff to run them, especially since we'd also need them to chase the students down, because it's not like they'll go just because they were told to. We can't fail students any more.
Our district has also even gotten rid of prizes for achievements - no more honor roll, no awards, nothing. Apparently this makes the low performers feel bad, and we couldn't have that.
And talking to the parents? Most parents are honestly great, but also, I never talk to them, because the kids with the great parents, I never need to call home. The asshole kids? Their parents are almost always a nightmare. And it's a waste of time to talk to them.
One kid last year, went after another kid's field trip paperwork with a pair of scissors. Ripped into her like no one's business. Sent an email home describing the situation. I was pretty sure, based on her history, she wasn't really going to destroy his stuff, she was trying to get a rise out of him, so I said something like, "while I believe she was only intending to annoy him, not actually destroy property, it is critical for her to understand that this is absolutely unacceptable behaviour" or something like that.
So rather than telling her kid off, mom goes to the principal to try to get me in trouble for calling her kid annoying.
In application? Doesn't matter what the teachers or even admin want to do. The district, province/state, and country have taken away practically every carrot and stick, when it comes to students with extreme behavior.
It's a huge mess.
I agree that that's an issue, to be sure.
Like, it's been a while since I was in university, but I remember learning about an incredibly stupid funds allocation process for new schools. They decided to fund schools according to their "percent allocation."
Basically, what percentage of a school that was actively being used for teaching was a key factor in how it got funded. The idea was to favor schools being built in more efficient ways, which sounds great on paper.
But it was the same kind of narrow minded pursuit of a type of efficiency incompatible with reality.
Gyms, theaters (for drama programs), cafeterias? None of these contribute to learning, obviously, so any schools with those get reduced funding.
What about office spaces? Unused classrooms, for schools that are built in anticipation of growing populations? Janitor closets? Staff rooms? Let's minimize those as much as possible, too! Because that makes all the sense!
Literally, in my district, (though I don't actually know if that is the actual reason) they closed the other middle school a few years ago, so that this one is the only middle school in town. It's vastly over capacity. We have two portables to handle the overflow. We have teachers sharing a classroom, where they have prep blocks in a different rotation, and a few PE classes to have one class's kids outside of the classroom.
And yet, there's an empty school not twenty minutes from here, abandoned. Like, what the hell...
But I guess this school is definitely being fully utilized, and that means it's more efficient, right...? Sigh.
Likely all done by tax activist And conservative legislators in order to shrink services and government.