In a column entitled “Teacher speaking out about beating,” Rick Badie (columnist for the Atlanta, GA, US, Journal-Constitution describes his reaction to a terribly unfortunate incident in which a middle school teacher was injured by a student. Here are the first few paragraphs of his column:
The swelling has subsided, but her head still throbs.
Her nerves are shot. She feels hot and cold sensations in her mouth. She needs new glasses. Her old ones got broken in the attack.
Janie Fair says she was standing in the hallway of Lilburn Middle School. She didn’t see the 12-year-old girl approach her side. The seventh-grader yelled insults and called the teacher names. She punched Fair four or five times.
It was a beatdown.
“I had a ballpoint pen in my right hand,” Fair told me Monday. “I took my left hand and pushed her away from me and tried to restrain her. Another teacher jumped in, grabbed her and took her to the office.”
Last Wednesday, Fair became the county’s poster child for teachers who get assaulted by students. Physical attacks against teachers, or school employees, apparently are rare in Gwinnett.
Mr. Badie goes one to explain his repulsion to this event and his concern about the lack of discipline in schools. There are very many comments on this post. It’s worth reading not just Mr. Badie’s calmly reasoned view, but the more inflammatory comments.
Let me know if you see any that offer constructive recommendations.
Sphere: Related Content
“Physical attacks against teachers, or school employees, apparently are rare in Gwinnett.”
This is very misleading. I grew up in Atlanta, and we’ve had a history some of the most violent public school systems…long before the media noticed the Columbine massacre.
There were kids in the late 80’s that held up the cafeteria at Grady HS with sawed-off shotguns, students had to walk through metal-detectors at North Fulton HS. A kid at North Atlanta got beaten within an inch of his life at the football fields during recess and just left unconscious for an entire class period before anyone did anything. Things like this may not be a daily occurrence, but it’s not an exaggeration to say violence happens on a weekly basis.
The week that Rodney King got beaten, all white kids were told by the faculty not to show up to class for at least a week.
Perhaps the most curious was during the early 90’s when kids weren’t allowed to bring any backpacks that weren’t transparent plastic or mesh (so that you couldn’t hide weapons.)