Last week was one of our worst in quite a while. Knapper erupted at 12:05pm on Monday and it lasted for almost two hours. Gnu removed all the scholars to our safe place and I stayed in the room trying to get him to de-escalate. Numerous papers were torn into pieces and scattered around the room. Obscenities (the F-word and the B-word) were written on the front white board and on several smaller portable white boards. As Knapper wrote the obscenities on the smaller white boards he placed them in various locations around the classroom to emphasize his displeasure with the days events. While all of this was going on, I just observed as he was not in danger of hurting himself or others. Eventually he got around to putting himself at risk of injury so I called for Crisis Team support. With Crisis Team members in the classroom we slowly closed in and cornered Knapper. Unfortunately, now trapped in a corner, objects started getting thrown at the adults in the room and that can't happen. Within thirty seconds Knapper was in the timeout room and the door was secured with our newly installed magnet that can resist 1200 pounds of pressure. Given Knapper's state of anger, it was decided to have a parental unit called to come and get him as there was some concern about getting him on the bus at the end of the day. A short while later the parental unit showed up. I opened the door to the time out room and the parental unit walked into the room, retrieved Knapper, who started crying, and took him home. Shortly after the school day ended Gnu contacted Knapper's parental unit to see how he was doing. The parental unit responded that he had settled down and then the parental unit told Gnu what caused this eruption. As it has in the past, very simple things can cause a scholar to erupt. In this case, Knapper forgot it was grandparents day and at 12:05pm he remembered and erupted.
BigHouse and S&T ride to school on the same bus everyday. On Tuesday, as I was walking to my morning bus duty I saw BigHouse sitting on the sidewalk leaning on one of the school's support columns. Seeing this at 8:45am is not a good thing and before I could even speak to him his bus monitor approached me. The bus monitor speaking, "there was a fight on the bus and BigHouse punched another scholar in the eye." I asked the bus monitor, "who was the other scholar?" The bus monitor responded, "S&T." Great! The academic day hasn't even started and two of our scholars are got into a fight on the bus. I sent them both inside the building to get breakfast and head to the BigB's office with my bus incident reports for her to sign. As I'm standing at her desk I notice a bullet sitting there. When she finished talking to another teacher I asked her, "are you collecting bullets today?" She responds, "yes," opens up her desk drawer and pulls out a small sandwich bag and places the bullet in the bag with several others and says to me, "I've been collecting them for a while." With the bullet safely secured, I hand her the bus incidents reports. She looks at them and says to me, "oh my god, both scholars are in your classroom," and signs her name on the bottom. I tell the BigB that I'll get back to her later when Gnu decides what to do with these scholars and head to the classroom.
Now in the classroom I hand Gnu the bus incident reports and she looks at me and says, "who threw the punches?" I respond that there was only one punch and BigHouse threw it." Gnu, who is slightly agitated, collects the day's worksheets, pulls out one of each for BigHouse, hands them to him, and tells him he will spend the day in our in-school suspension room. Not happy with Gnu's decision, BigHouse's anger is increasing and I'm standing up. Gnu speaking to BigHouse, "we have three field trips coming up. If you want to go on these field trips I suggest you head upstairs." Begrudgingly, BigHouse is exiting the room with EM as his escort. When EM arrives back in the classroom I asked him is everything went smoothly. He responded, "yes, Mr. Schultz." In less then ten minutes our classroom phone rings. I see the number of the person calling and know this is not going to be good. "Room XXX, Mr. Schultz speaking." "You need to get up here right away," the voice on the other end says. "I'm on my way," and out the door I go. When I walk into our in-school suspension room, Duck, a member of our Crisis Team is already there and she has BigHouse pinned into a corner as he is in an absolute rage. I step up behind her and ask, "what is my role?" Duck responds, "take one wrist and one leg as I'm having trouble containing him." I take my position and Duck says to me, "watch your head, he's tried to head butt me several times." As soon as Duck finished talking BigHouse bangs his forehead into the wall. Before Duck can even say anything I place my hand on BigHouse's forehead to lessen the blows as he repeatedly tries to slam his head into the wall. As we are trying to contain BigHouse, the person in charge of the in-school suspension room walks up and says to me, "he was fine when he arrived. I asked him to remove his hoodie and he knocked all of his papers onto the floor. As I was picking them up and placing them back on his desk I got to close and he headed butted me in the face."
After another twenty minutes of struggling with BigHouse his parental unit shows up and he is on his way home. The initial bus incident was an argument between BigHouse and S&T. From what I can figure out both of them we either in the same neighborhood at the same time or on a bus together at another school and a fight erupted between them. Please note that the fight they had was over two years ago. Please also note that BigHouse arrive calmly in our in-school suspension room but the simple request to remove his hoodie set him off big time.
The school year is winding down. Only sixteen days to go and I'll finish year four. It's the start of the day and Gnu is walking back to my desk with her calendar to go over the plan for the remainder of the school year. As she started talking I knew she was agitated. "Look at this calendar, field trip #1, field trip #2, field trip #3, and in the middle of all this is the NWEA testing process for our third and fourth grade scholars," she says to me. "If the scholars do not meet their end of the year academic goal, my salary increase goes away. With this test being so important why would anyone schedule three field trips that will do nothing but reduce the amount of academic time needed to do review work prior to this test," she continued. Sensing her frustration I'm treading lightly. "The scholars showed improvement the last time they took the NWEA test. In fact, a couple of them met their end of the year academic improvement goal. Let's just stay on task, do as much as we can with what little time we have and I'm sure everything will turn our fine." My comment seemed to settle her down as she headed back to her desk at the front of the room but as she was walking I was thinking. "What idiot would schedule three field trips in a sixteen day period knowing full well the importance of the NWEA test." The answer was simple, an overhead person who has no responsibility for getting scholars to pass a test.
Two serious eruptions in our classroom but no suspensions as the individuals that don't sit in a classroom are committed to closing the pipeline to prison but they show little concern about the ever growing pipeline of teachers exiting their chosen profession. Such is the state of academics right now.
That's it. Another blog post completed. I'm going to shift gears next week and talk a little about private school education. I know what I want to talk about but I'm hesitant to bring it up. My plan is to write the blog next week and have my part time editor, part time consultant, and full time spouse approve what I've written. Hopefully, if I choose my words carefully, you will get to see what I wrote because if you think public schools have issues you should see what is going on in private schools.
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