its an interesting question; should teachers, especially teachers with rough students, have the same sort of protection that officers or MTA workers have?
ideally, it would more effective to find ways to understand why teachers are threatened (most of us inner-city folks get it often), or why students feel the need to threaten teachers, or if there are positive behavior tools that can prevent this, AND then lead to disciplinary actions (or juvy) if you threaten a teacher
1) Not all inner city schools have an atmosphere where teachers get threatened by students often. At my school it happens because the principal does little or actually blames the teacher.
2) Just for argument's sake, why not report these incidents to the police, at least the police in the building? If a student threatened me and did not immediately apologize, I think I'd get the school police to give him a good talking to till he did apologize (admittedly, not so easy for you folks with big 19-year-old high school students).
P.S. why are you having such a hard time with the custodial staff in your building? Those guys at my school are my heroes, along with the school PD.
If it's illegal for a kid to threaten me as a stranger on the street it should be illegal for him to do it in a school. Think of it as a real life civics lesson.
The school police in our schools don't "give talkings to" they give citations (fighting, disrupting the peace)and the kid shows up in juvenile court with parents paying fines.
I'm down with this... provided it's also illegal to threaten other students.
This was definitely a problem at the school where I used to work.
MTZ
TeacherJ,
I certainly envy you your custodial staff. Like anyone, they vary building to building. When I started out I worked in a school with a petty, vindictive payroll secretary. The entire staff lived in fear of her. She was kind of like the Soup Nazi, except rather than soup, she wielded your paycheck.
I'm ashamed to admit I'd rather be chasing after soap.
Ok, on one hand I don't think anybody wants to work in an environment where they are threatened. This includes both teachers and students.
On the other hand, I fear this sort of law can be misused by a hopefully small percentage of teachers against students they do not like.
The gripping hand is that we need to follow Geoff's advice and figure out why these threats happen in the first place. Let's cure the disease instead of taking a placebo for the symptoms.
Commenting by HaloScan
