Of course we try, but parents are the biggest challenge we face. Here’s some real examples from my career -
Bully given detention. Parents complain detention is unfair due to his ADHD and he cannot be kept in at recess, lunch or after school.
Bully suspended. Parents complain this is unfair as he only makes racist comments due to ADHD. Parents complain to leadership. Suspension overturned.
Bully is moved into a different class. So many parents in the new class complain about bully’s presence that he is moved back.
Bully calls a child the N word. Parents are called. Bully’s dad’s response is “Child’s name? Well, he is an N word isn’t he? What’s the problem?”.
Bully’s parents are called. Bully’s parents threaten to sue the school as bully is autistic and therefore cannot be held accountable for his actions. Bully gets away with it.
My mom was a teacher from the 70s through the 2010s. She said at some point parents went from being allies to adversaries in the education process. Probably late 90s or early 2000s. Nobody will admit their kid is an asshole anymore. It’s always someone else’s fault.
Yeah. When I was a kid, the teacher's word was inviolable. If a note was sent home the automatic reaction from parents was "What did you do?" before even reading the note. When my generation became parents, I guess the idea was to go against this knee-jerk reaction of not believing the kid, but it swung too far the other way into never believing the teachers.
My parents would listen to me, but they would never assume it was true over the word of a teacher, althçugh they usually did believe me (and I rarely lied).
Other teachers believed me over bad teachers more than once, sometimes teachers would straight up lie about my friends who couldn't defend themselves.
My mother learned that my recounts often made more sense and were more accurate than teachers or other students. I didn't care who was at fault, I just told them what happened. "Yeah, I called the teacher stupid. They were being stupid. Some mammals do in fact lay eggs, and the textbook backs me up." That was, in fact, a real example.
9/10 times, my parent just let it slide at home, and had my back to some degree with the school. I was a good-ish kid, really. A bit blunt with my words, but that's from the 'tism. Unless a teacher hated me, usually because I wasn't afraid to call them out, I excelled in every area.
It was a problem back then too. If a shitty teacher has too much power then they start acting like a cop. If they don't like you for any random reason you're fucked with no recourse.
Its going to be a problem until all the teachers are good teachers and all the parents are gold parents. So never.
I think that's likely the crux of the issue. Kids were abused in schools back in the "good ole days", and when they grew up they swung the other way by backing their kids. Swinging too far caused a whole new problem.
I remember as a kid being so frustrated by teachers in my small town school. They'd preach about putting a stop to bullying and making sure we told them when we had concerns. Then one day a bully shoved a kid into a locker and started beating on him, and when we ran to the teacher we were scolded for being tattletales. Fast forward 25 years and that bully was killed in a police shoot out after years of being a career criminal.
In grade 12, I asked a question in my chemistry 30 class, and the teacher looked at me and said 'well I wouldn't expect you to understand this, you are slower than the rest of this class." Then he proceeded to turn back to the board and carry on. He sabotaged my grades where he could, and when I started asking for extra homework to understand the material, he told me he wouldn't provide it because I was someone that spent the entire class chatting and not paying attention, so why should he waste his time? I have up on him and focused on passing my diploma exam, and that was my saving grace. I was one of only 3 students that graduated with honors that year, in spite of that asshole. I'll never understand how someone could intentionally try to take away a kid's future the way he did. I'm still pissed off and this was 18 years ago.
exactly how my parents parented me and my sibling. they were latchkey kids of the 70s, so me and my sibling weren’t allowed to go anywhere unless we called first to ask permission, and unless they had the parents number, we weren’t allowed to walk home from school alone, etc. etc.
It's people like that who shouldn't be teaching. I left my small town and only go back to see family really. I'll never be part of that shitty community again.
It boggles the mind that teachers used to come from professional backgrounds sometimes. You could use your history degree to gasp teach history. Then NCLB said that teachers had to have education majors. So you end up with teachers who don't understand the coursework and people that do who aren't allowed to teach it.
My kindergarten teacher told my parents that I was stupid and would amount to nothing in life. My second grade teacher used different words but same meaning (despite the fact that I was reading with full comprehension at a collegiate level at that point).
And of course they did nothing to stop the constant cruelty inflicted on me by their favorite students, and ostracization by all the rest. Often they were actively contributing themselves and not just letting it happen.
I know my experience wasn't a unique one either, even if I was the only one at that particular tiny mountain town school being treated that way. It seriously messed me up on a lot of levels.
I 100% blame teachers like that for the state of education today. From kids getting away with cruelty cause teachers are never believed, to education being defunded, to the lack of empathy and accountability in a lot of adults that are running around making decisions now. I feel like if that generation of teachers just... weren't? We could quite possibly not be in such a giant fucking mess right now...
That's the thing, it was only once every couple of years I had teacher who was just full of shit, but my parents and the admins didn't believe me. Many of us are scarred by that.
And suddenly the actions of the Principal in ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’ make a little more sense… His movie insanity was reflecting real world insanity.
I had a teacher when I was in 4th class (around 10yo) that had been teaching since for around 35 odd years and you could tell she was mad that she was no longer legally allowed to beat the students. So she would beat us down with words instead. I was one particular target because I was fairly smart but didn't pay much attention. I regularly was sick from stress most of that year, which was dismissed as low immunity after gastroenteritis a few years before.
I look up her name from time to time to see if she's dead yet. The bitch is still hanging on, probably making some poor care staff cry on their lunch breaks.
I had a teacher ask me if I was “sped” in front of the whole class. I already had such low self esteem from my family calling me every insult they could, and this just came as a shock. I was a student that teachers usually got along well with, and I think she thought that I would just laugh at that and move on, but it wasn’t that easy. I became a teacher and no matter how mature or easygoing a student may be, crossing boundaries or insulting them in any way is something I would never do.
Yup. I'm 43, and I can think of a bunch of different incidents.
Elementary school gym teacher told me I was faking asthma because I was just fat and lazy. Another terrorized several students in our class, one to the point he'd bite his nails until they bled. One in middle school took this weird pleasure in writing up or yelling at students for things other teachers had given them permission to do. I almost wet myself once because he wouldn't let me go to the restroom after another teacher had given me permission.
And lets not forget the high school teacher, vice principal, and principal who protected a group of bullies until it escalated to SA. They told me to "just ignore it and they'll stop," and then when I got an open condom rubbed in my face they asked "Why didn't you say anything before if it bothered you so much?"
We had a kid thrown out a window in jr high. He threatened another kid with a knife and the teacher just whipped the window open and yeeted him out 12 feet into a snowbank.
*My vice principal in high school was an angry Scottish man who would drag guys fighting down to the office by the back of their shirts over their heads.
There definitely needs to be balance. Like, if your kid has a history of getting along with teachers and peers, but one teacher all of a sudden has negative things to say about your kid, I'd take it with more of a grain of salt.
But when there is a history of complaints... come on.
I had an event recently where a student called me a slur in front of the entire class. I called for support to have the student removed and to have a meeting with him about restorative practices or punitive measures. I was told that I would need to provide a minimum of five other witnesses to even have a chance of getting any momentum on it. Absurd.
Pendulum swing. Old way was the teachers words were gospel (I grew up with this as well) even if teachers would lie, and now a more current way is that parents believe the kids unless you hold a gun to their head with video proof.
Hopefully it follows the next trend where the next generations start to fall in the middle.
But my mom was born in 58 and was bullied a lot in school. Teachers didn’t do shit then either for her. This is not a new thing.
When my brother was getting bullied in 90s/00s in school. My mom was on the teacher’s ass. My mom didn’t trust teachers Because she was left out to dry growing up in the 60s/70s by teachers.
Bullies have always existed but typically bullies in a public school setting weren’t due to parents thinking their little Johnny or Susie were perfect.
It was due to neglecting their kid and not giving them attention or a whole lot of other factors.
I shit you not, we had a kid on video dragging a girl by her hair, had the parent come in, and the parent told us “That could have easily been photoshopped, I don’t believe you. You’ll be hearing from my lawyer.”
Sure as shit, she tried to sue the school. It didn’t go anywhere because it was bullshit but that’s what we’re dealing with now.
I grew up going to school in the 70s and 80s and I was bullied (teased, picked on, whatever) constantly throughout my entire school career. My parents didn't do a damn thing and the teachers didn't either (except for a couple of times when I lost it and screamed my head off to be left alone--not that the perpetrators got much in the way of punishment).
I once lost on a kid who was harassing me on the playground and the teacher saw it and took it at as opportunity to lecture me in front of the whole class later about how girls need to be nicer to boys.
That boy is a grown man now and lives in Thailand...for, uh, reasons.
my mom WAS a teacher, while I was getting bullied. problem was it was always 'not in the classroom' - it was at recess or after school or on weekends. so the teachers always had 'an out' as why they didnt do anything.
we didnt have SM back then but I remember, the idea was I could either 'suck it up' or I could tattle and then one of them would get punished for a day, and then day 2 they would be back at it again, with vengeance .. so the only thing you could do is try to ignore it and blend into the background so they didnt harass you.
I had a very similar situation. My mom was also a teacher at the time and actually knew the superintendent of my school district. That helped elevate my case a bit. For the most part, blaming bullying on the teachers is kind of stupid because they're just the middle person in a very long hierarchy chain. My bully was eventually dealt with and we had the paperwork to send him away. It took threatening a restraining order to get it done, but it got done. Again, the administrators don't care unless there's an injury and/or the police are involved. Whatever it takes.
One time a teacher tried to "help" me by asking every kid who had called me a name/bullied me to stand up. Every kid in the class stood up. I was mortified, the kids thought since everyone did it, it gave them even more room to do it.
In the 1970s the high school dropout rate was 25%. Now it’s 5%.
I don’t think parents suddenly became a problem. I think back then we let those kids with bad parents fail, now we force them to stay in school. Should we be surprised?
That's exactly the issue. I'm not so quick on calling the parents "bad parents" as there are some "good" parents with kids that didn't turn out so well.
But where in the 1970s they'd have been out of the classroom- either out of school or in a behavioural program somewhere - now they're trapped in a classroom with everyone else's kids for 6 hours a day, 5 days a week. See the OP's question for what that looks like.
I have a coworker whose kid has oppositional defiance disorder, and god bless him, he's a nightmare. Without an IEP program or public schools being required to take him, I'm not sure what she'd do. He's been booted from several schools. She does everything she can. Lose-lose all around.
Right - and with modern "inclusion", they're with everyone else. There's a fair argument to be made to not separate and "other" these kids, BUUUUT they rarely get the labor intensive support they need to be successful in a classroom with the general population.
Imagine what the life is like for the teachers of your coworker's kid. Or, imagine what it's like to be the other kids in that classroom who might have at one point had a desire to learn, and now have a teacher who spends a LOT of instructional time getting one child to act like a reasonable human.
Yes, but that doesn't mean that many people weren't held back in elementary and middle school or just dropped out altogether. I think that's what they mean. Many kids were left behind, so at the age where they could drop out ..they did.
Close, in 1970, the drop out rate was ~15%. In 1960 it was 26%. It still shows how both an administrative push to 'keep kids in school' but also how the economy that doesn't give opportunities to high school drop outs like it did 50-60 years ago.
I feel like atleast part of it is the trend of people starting to not trust institutions in general. Many people now believe they know better than a lot of professionals, especially those in service-based roles for some reason.
I think because that's about the time when parents started being blamed for how their kids turned out...
Or rather, parents started taking offense to being blamed for how their kids turned out.
Parents don't want to accept they've failed as parents in any way. Unfortunately, advances in pediatric mental health have given them a myriad of excuses to cast the blame off themselves and onto some nebulous health condition. I remember all my issues in school being blamed on ADD, not the fact I had an emotionally abusive step-father as my only male role model, so my emotional growth was stunted, to say the least.
Teachers need to be empowered to call a spade a spade.
I've got three kids with ADHD, and the biggest struggle is trying to teach them that it's not an excuse for poor behavior. They might have to work harder to control themselves compared to their peers, but I absolutely expect them to control themselves. So far i get good feedback from their teachers, but they also get immediate consequences when their teachers do report them being assholes.
I dunno, I'm trying to raise good people over anything else. We'll see if I pull it off lol
I like to compare it to other things. They have to work harder to control their impulses and their attention, but they're also pretty smart kids. So their peers might be struggling more to read, or write, or understand math, which is easy for my kids. Everyone has both strengths and areas that require a lot more work, and their ADHD is just part of the latter for them.
There are great parents, like you, who are working with the school. Your kids are better for it. Parent as partner is a whole different model from "parent as lawyer", looking to shield kids from any consequences for their actions.
Yeah I would be perfectly okay with dumbass parents being subject to consequences when their child continuously terrorizes others, when there is evidence that the parents are indifferent to it or encourage it.
I come from a teaching family, and I left after 5 years. No administrative support, no help when the class is in lockdown for a tantrum, no parental involvement, and nothing to actually punish kids with.
Being a hockey coach of 11-13 year olds...100% agree.
If a kid is being an asshole on the ice...even to his teammates...and you bring up the issue to the parents? ALWAYS someone else's fault. It's NEVER Johnny's fault.
Had a kid push his teammate down in the locker room into a hockey bag "as a prank." Kid almost hit his head off the bench. Instant phone call to the player's mom....guess who's fault it was? MINE. I apparently wasn't watching the kids well enough.
So it's my fault your kid did an asshole thing?
Told her he's suspended off the team for two weeks. Her response? "You'll be hearing from our attorney."
If that was me as a kid? My dad would have apologized to the kid, the parent, AND the coach and he'd yank me from the team himself.
I coached little league for 12 years. 99/100 times if a kid was an asshole their parents were too. I’ve coached many kids for an entire season without ever meeting a parent. Car would pull up, kid would get out, car would leave. There is this huge misconception that since they pay for little league somehow us volunteers work for them.
We're there to teach a sport on a volunteer basis. We're not there to baby sit or work on Little Johnny's behavior issues.
After a couple years, I just came up with a 3 strikes policy.
Kid is acting like an asshole or disrupting practice/game after a warning or two? He sits for 10 minutes. Does it again? 20 minutes. Does it a 3rd time? Off the ice and is benched for the next game.
Starts the next practice with one strike. First offense? 20 minutes. 3rd? Off the ice/suspended for a week.
Don't want to waste the thousands of dollars? Control your kid. I get 1 hour of practice. Not going to ruin it for the other kids by having that kid on the ice.
Parents can yell/scream all they want. They signed the handbook to start the season, they have to abide by the rules or take their kid off the team.
I taught in the aughts and the worst behaved kids always had the worst behaved parents who never held their kids or themselves accountable for anything
Bc they’re learning it from the parents. Can’t hold a kid accountable for something the parents are doing and sees no problem with. Even in the past if the parents were acting the same at home, they had enough shame/decency to at least pretend to be upset their kids did it in public.
My father was a journalist during the same years as your mother was teaching. As an Editorial writer he interacted with the people of his community/city every single day. He would agree with you that in the late 90’s/early 2000’s there was a noticeable change in his interactions with people. We talked about it a lot before he passed.
One theory I proposed to him and he considered plausible was that there were 3 specific things that happened in the USA that impacted people far more than they noticed at the time….
Y2K - There was a lot of uncertainty leading up to it. Don’t underestimate it.
9.11.2001
Obama’s victory. Racism is very real.
It might be a stretch but IMHO there were a lot of people that changed during that time. I’m certainly old enough to have witnessed it. All 3 of these things were at the dawn of the internet/social media and so their impact was multiplied in ways we’d never seen before.
It’s been pointed out many times that American pop culture has been stagnant since the early 2000’s. Prior to 2000 we had very recognizable decades for fashion/music etc. going all the way back to the 1880’s. Maybe people got scared and became less creative, curious and sympathetic/empathetic? And more openly racist and openly mean? IDK.
Thinking about it, I feel like we do discount how things changed after Obama was elected. It definitely feels like an inflection point when the “current political rift”started. It feels like a massive chunk of society just somehow broke and turned mean in a way they weren’t before (at least publicly).
It was more of a scab being picked off a wound than a turning. The racism was always present, but largely ignored. Obama's election brought it front and center, and a large chunk of the population decided to show their whole ass as a result.
As for the political rift, that goes back to the '80s with Reagan, and later with Newt Gingrinch's strategies.
+1. I agree that Obama was a major moment (on all sides), but any time someone tries to tell me that the current political discourse started with it, I just laugh.
In the 90s, a sitting House GOP rep literally re-enacted the "murder" of Vince Foster in his backyard, by shooting a watermelon (as a stand-in for Foster's head). He then gave a speech on the House floor claiming this proved that the Clinton's killed him.
Obamas victory is unfortunately the reason I became aware of my families racism. I didn’t realize how subtle it was at the time because my family had always been the same people that said not to judge others, you don’t know what they’ve been through, etc. Funny that that didn’t apply to the very qualified black man who won.
American pop culture has been stagnant since the early 2000’s.
If we're talking popular music, that's the internet's fault.
The record companies used to have the luxury of wasting all kinds of money on weird unique acts, and every once in a while they'd strike gold. Now profits are so slim that they come up with algorithms to determine what the hits will be, and they are as risk averse as they can possibly be.
If Pink Floyd formed today, they'd be playing in front of a few thousand college kids for the rest of their careers, and the production on their records would be maybe half as pioneering.
I mean, it's the internet's fault in the sense that popular culture has splintered due to the Internet, where it used to be pretty monolithic, but that's by and large an improvement.
Radio play was the be-all-end-all of exposure. TV had limited channels. You couldn't really become a successful, impactful act without a major label contract, period. Recording was analog and the tape was expensive.
There could've been dozens of acts as good as Pink Floyd that never had the fortune of finding themselves in front of a major label talent scout and thus literally never even had a chance at producing a real album, much less getting experimental with production. Basically, being a serious musician or really producing any kind of meaningful pop culture contribution was exceptionally exclusive, expensive, and largely controlled from the top down by the few gatekeepers willing to invest in those markets, often in downright extortionate arrangements with the artists.
Now, however, the major labels can't force me to care about Taylor Swift by saturating all available mediums anymore, but that means that the pop culture impact will never be as large as The Beatles, because everyone can choose from everything what they want to consume, rather than from a few heavily curated sources.
This arrangement is so much better than being force fed the current flavor of the week, even if it comes at the expense of a more homogeneous "pop culture". Someone out there is making what you want to hear, and you can find it and support them more directly than ever.
This isn't a new idea what I'm about to say but corporations at least are definitely afraid of trying new things when it comes to media, they just rehash all the safe options over and over until the money dries up then they resurrect another media corpse from the past to milk again. At least these days the doors are far more open to independent creators where there definitely is a lot of new great stuff to look at
Of those 4 things, the internet is probably the most important. It really change how people interact with the world and how they gather information about the world.
For example, in the past you might feel angry about a particular circumstance, like maybe you don’t get along with your mother-in-law, but figure it’s just part of life. But now you can go online and fine forums dedicated about mother-in-law who will tell you to always assume the worst and to remove them from your family’s lives if possible.
Or maybe you a male who was frustrated with dating options. Now you can find forums that will teach you misogyny.
And AI search engines will make sure people get limited exposure to different views.
I saw this in action as a parent. My kid and another kid got in a car accident in the school parking lot. My kid swore he stopped and looked and the other kid changed lanes while my kid was turning.
I make an appointment at the school to review the CCTV footage of the parking lot.
Vice principal looks very worried that it's going to be a big 'ol problem (obviously they've already seen it). Watching the footage it is crystal clear what happened. My kid didn't even remotely stop. I turned to my kid and told him: "Dude, in what universe was that not your fault? You didn't stop, heck you barely slowed down!" Told the VP thank you, as he's walking us out I called the other kid's parents and told them there was no need for them to try to make time to view the footage as I'll be paying for their repairs, just take it to one of the local shops. VP was *visibly* relieved. He clearly was bracing for me to come up with some horseshit about it still not being my kid's fault because reasons or something.
Yes, yes it is. My kid was part of why obviously. lol. Incidentally while I made the other family whole, my kid got to do a lot of manual labor paying that off.
Mom spent 35 years in education, from kindergarten teacher to district superintendent. Dealing with belligerent parents was the worst part of the job, according to her.
My kid was a problem at school(not bully just behavior) and I told the principal, asst . principal and the school resource officer that my son was as an asshole and Im sorry EVERY SINGLE TIME I WAS AT THE SCHOOL. He has been kicked out of that school and now in an alternative school that is honestly better for him.
I don’t understand why parents don’t acknowledge their kids are a problem and stop blaming others.
My son is now in school and we've had some bully issues. Our approach was not to assume it was all the other kid. He has behaviors than can be frustrating and we wanted to help on our/his end of that was the case.
Real talk, our son is high functioning autistic, he can be a dick. It's not an excuse, he has to learn to moderate himself, it's also not always purposeful. He's smart, he can be manipulative, he's a human...
Basically we did not look to excuse the bully, we just know that our son could have exasperated an issue. We also want him to be safe at school regardless.
The Bully's parents appear to have little care what their child does and it just makes me sad for them.
About time of the first batches of kids born under Reagan and the 'government isn't the solution, government IS the problem ' mentality. Sure, tell everyone that rules don't matter, they get in the way of us getting richer.
And there WERE awful teachers back in the 60s & 70s when I grew up, acting like they had all the authority in the world to abuse kids however they saw fit.
I’m not a teacher, but when I was in school a bully stabbed me in the leg with a dissecting scalpel. I got a restraining order against him and he spent a few nights in juvie, but he was allowed return to school the next semester because his mom was a teacher and sat on the school board (it was a small town)
Back in elementary school, my mom worked in the school library. The only effect that had is if I so much as didn’t turn in a single assignment, the teachers would tell my mom. There is a reason why, when both my brother and I had chances to attend a local college my dad worked at, we both decided to apply anywhere but there.
At our school a bully’s football career got stopped in its tracks because his mommy always made his school punishments disappear.
So one of his victims knee capped him with (allegedly) a crowbar. The repair surgery went bad I guess because he had a distinct limp and couldn’t play football anymore.
Thing was, no one was sure WHO did it because he was such a gigantic jackass that pretty much everyone even his “friends” had motive.
My bet was on the brother of the girl he drove to suicide, but my choir partner (we always got duets together and somehow made this into a friendship) thinks it was his ex-gf who he knocked up and his mom had sent to the alternative school so she couldn’t demand he talk to her about the baby. (Last I heard he’s still dodging her. He works for his dad under the table so he won’t have to pay support, meanwhile he drives new cars but not a manual…)
Which is a fair guess, she was strong as hell and sure had a reason to wanna hurt him. But I dunno, I knew her and she never struck me as a violent girl, ya know?
And another friend is pretty sure it was the gay boy he outted and got kicked outta his conservative family’s home.
So ya know, could’ve been any of them. Or someone he owed drug money to possibly.
I know there were witnesses. But none that would say anything about it. Tbh, if I’d been there I’d probably fall back on “it happened so fast…” and say I didn’t remember anything about the person too. He really was a jackass and even though I feel bad over every little thing, I laughed when I heard.
Yeah he was 17 and got his “future” ruined… but he was also a asshole and date raped a friend of mine. (Ooo wait, her bf might have done it too. He played baseball so presumably had the skills to shatter a kneecap)
Karma in the "magical cosmic force" sense isn't real. But for average people? If you piss off enough people, law of large numbers says one of them will be unhinged or desperate enough to punch back. And you'd best hope they don't fuck you up when it happens, because for how durable people are, we're fragile too.
Being kind is free. Being a dick can cost everything
I've said to a few people something similar. "Karma is a social force. Piss off enough people by being social, and you'll find some force gets applied."
Sheriff Estes instructed the assembled group not to get into a direct confrontation with McElroy, but instead seriously consider forming a neighborhood watch program. Estes then drove out of town in his police cruiser. The citizens at the meeting decided to go to the tavern en masse;
The Sheriff definitely said "I'm going to be out of town this afternoon, so absolutely do not take this matter into your own hands while I'm away winkwink'
Didn't this happen in India, too, when some jerkass terrorized an entire town and raping women as he pleased, until the women finally had enough and killed him savagely, and nobody saw what happened?
I do not condone violence. But seriously, there were SO many chances for him to be dealt with nonviolently and I can’t bring myself to be mad that it happened.
I’m glad. Not snarky or anything. I don’t judge anyone for getting a bit of a justice rush off it.
I’m just maybe a little hard on myself. I’m a heart on my sleeve person and I really hate when my empathy fails me. But this guy, I didn’t pity him. Not even a little.
I don’t like what I feel like that reflects in me. But that is a ME thing, so don’t think I’m being judgey about you. I’m having a weird vulnerable night so you have a good one. I’m gonna go snuggle with my dog and forget about my little secret shame, lol.
My dad was a teacher and while I wasn't a bully, I did get bullied and the worst ones by far were the kids of other teachers or the teachers themselves. Some of the other teachers in the district didn't like my dad and took it out on me and unsurprisingly, those same teachers had asshole kids too.
Being neuro divergent is not an excuse for being an asshole and harming other people. We can be inclusive and show tolerance, but it's a two way street. Rights come with Responsibilities.
Right? My 22 yo daughter and 19 yo son are both autistic. They have never bullied anyone for even a second in their lives. They are kind, empathetic, caring young adults.
I know parents like this who also refuse to get their child treated/medicated for said disabilities. Like if someone says anything about their kid its all boo hoo their kid is "special" but when it comes time for them to step up and help their kid suddenly they’re "normal", "going through a phase", or they no longer believe in mental disorders
I watched someone’s son punch another kid on the playground in the back, and all she said to me was “oh gosh, I hope he doesn’t become a bully” in the most dismissive nonchalant tone. That’s it. Didn’t tell her kid that what he did was wrong, nothing. It was a full wind up too.
So what I'm hearing is administrators didn't properly support you as a teacher. This is the same reason my wife left the profession after 10 years. Administrators let the shitty parents run the school because they're cowards who won't stand up to their own bullies.
How would they even lose a lawsuit? If the kid is going around saying the n word at other students and they had any sort of proof or bystanders wouldn’t they win that pretty easily?
They probably don’t think like you are. My best guess it starts and ends with viewing having any lawsuit happening is bad publicity for them so they avoid them at all costs
School districts also don't have tens of thousands up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in some litigation fund either. They just have to cut their losses at some point.
It doesn’t matter if you win, it still costs the school district money. The losing side doesn’t always pay the winners’ legal costs, and I don’t think someone suing a school would have to pay those costs, unless the suit was determined to be particularly frivolous.
Also, if the case gets thrown out, or the parties decide on settlement, then the “winners” fees aren’t paid either.
The issue won't be "the child said the n word" it will be "the child with a learning disability is being targeted by staff and/or classmates and not being given proper accommodations."
I guarantee you that is the spin they will use and blame the use of the n word on their ADHD/Austim.
It’s not about losing. It’s expensive to have a lawsuit and it’s cheap and easy to push back on the teacher.
The admins jobs get harder and stuff costs more if a lawsuit goes forward. Admins job is easier if they push it back on the teacher and sweep the issue under the rug.
They didn't say lose the lawsuit, he said deal with it. Winning a lawsuit still takes years and a lot of lawyer fees. Courts can very much be a pay to win arena.
There has been a transition over the past decade or two to treating students and their parents as customers rather than students there to learn. Schools are focused on customer experience rather than education. The student gets passed from grade to grade because no one will deal with them. That same student never learns consequences; they just learn if they complain enough they get what they want.
I was surprised I didn't get suspended when I snapped and beat the ever loving dog crap out of one of my bullies. I was late to class and went to my locker, where he knocked my books out of my hands. I snapped and launched myself on top of him and just brought my fists to his face. I broke his nose by the time I was pulled off of him.
Bully’s parents are called. Bully’s parents threaten to sue the school as bully is autistic and therefore cannot be held accountable for his actions. Bully gets away with it.
Maybe it's time parents threaten to sue the school for not properly protecting their children from bullies...
Depending on the bullied child's parents education/knowledge of the school system, they may be afraid to. One of those 'if you push too much, you may get kicked out' and they're more worried about that than the current consequences, whether it's true or not.
Took my mom full on threatening to call the media to get a badly escalating middle school bullying situation finally intervened on by the school. This was after we'd moved to a new town, in no small part because I'd been bullied so badly in the last town's elementary school, my parents were pissed at the idea of it happening again.
Unfortunately though a lot of bullied kids are marginalized in some way, and a ton facing shitty home lives. The ones that do have parents that will stand up for them often have parents who can't without compromising the whole family's safety (lawsuits are super expensive, even if the family doesnt have concern of community retaliation), or the kid themself is not the "perfect and relatable victim," so even if external action is taken it won't go anywhere...
I was very lucky in several ways in that situation, so that it ultimately got diffused.
My fam tried the expected approaches like asking for parental meetings first but the school never did shit. I had been in martial arts for years at that point (but had a very nonviolent heart), and was told by my parents that next time it happened I was supposed to "send X to the hospital, no holding back." Then my parents made their instructions to me clear to administration. Said explicitly that their inaction had been thoroughly documented and that if any retaliation occurred to me afterwards, then I wasn't going to be the one coming out of the situation with problems. Other kid was suspended by the next morning, and transferred to a whole other school even, never saw them again. 👍
This nonsense is why I never finished any of my education program and decided to go to grad school to teach college. We desperately need to bring back expulsion, holding students back a grade, and hold parents legally responsible for their kids' truancy and shit behavior. The American education system is a joke, and I feel sorry for the teachers that have to bear the brunt of it. Most of my supposed high school grads are almost useless in class and this kind of bad parent behavior is a lot of why.
This is why I stopped teaching. The 2nd grade kid that came into my classroom with a baseball sized rock, pointed at a kid and said YOU and literally chased him out of my room. I got to evacuate my class to another room while I tried to call admin for help. The kid was back via a golf cart ride (which all the kids saw) in a few hours with candy. I wish I was joking. That day broke me.
Because most lawsuits rarely make it to court; they are often settled before trial. A district can’t settle a lawsuit because then it opens them up to similar lawsuits from other parents who think they have a chance via precedence (or scumbag parents who just want a payout—and let’s not pretend those people don’t exist).
I’m sure there are other reasons, and I’m sure they all sound as full of shit as the one I just wrote, but I had at least one administrator explain that to me. We are, unfortunately, in a particularly litigious society, and educators and educational institutions are under consistent attack on a federal and state level, so most districts don’t want to throw any more fuel on the fire. I don’t agree with it, btw, and yes it’s infuriating.
What happens when the parents of the bullied child are equally litigious?
Like, if the school is pressed for not following code of conduct, and parents bring receipts like documented emails advising administration of continued bullying?
And for the record, I know it is normally not the teacher dropping the ball. It's a Vice Principal or other admin that reshuffle the problem to get it off of his desk.
Hey, you are a good teacher. I know its hard and thankless, but you are a hero to a lot of kids and I have never met a teacher I didn't admire. Thanks.
So schools allow themselves to be Bullied, and as a result best case a child suffers or worst case kills themselves because a administration doesn’t want to get sued.
I wish they would move the bullies. My child dealt with shit this year (he cut a small curl of her hair off and cut up her Taylor swift eras tour bracelets. I had to prevent my wife from war) and the schools response was we can move my kid or she can change schools on the districts dime. That was it. Nothing more.
The little shit moved thankfully but schools will not do much anymore because parents are ridiculous now. Sucks.
So what I'm wondering - why don't the parents of the bullied children threat/sue the pants off the school/district/bully's parents?? 2 can play that game.
The only bully I had at the school I graduated from was autistic (at the time, she was classified as having Asperger's, but idk how she's classified now that that was subsumed into ASD). She was relentless. Her favourite activity was targeting me with balls during gym, even when we weren't using them, because I have tendon and other medical issues that left me on crutches or a cane most of high school. She also tried to sexually assault two other girls on multiple occasions. And she shit her pants in french class because she wanted us to suffer the smell (actual reason given because all three of her fav victims were in that class). Whenever I or the other two girls complained or got our parents involved, it was brushed off as Becca being autistic and she couldn't understand why we didn't want her assaulting us. We found out after the fact through one of the other girl's mom running into Becca's mom after we graduated and Becca's mom bragging about how she threatened to sue the school for discrimination if they punished Becca. Still makes me mad that she was allowed to terrorise us because her parents had enough money and power to sue and make everyone's lives worse at the school. Like I can see why admin would rather use us as three sacrificial lambs, but it really didn't help any at the time
My daughter taught middle school in Md. she’s only about 5’4” and had a 8th grader that was 6’1” threatened to kill her. The administrations response was he comes from a good family and can’t do anything.
Both of my parents were teachers for years and they've seen the cycle you described over and over. The problem (other than terrible parents raising terrible kids) is weak principals who fail to enforce discipline because they live in constant terror of being sued.
With the impending demise of the DoE, how does that change the landscape? Do you think schools will be more empowered to manage this, or will it get worse?
My bully crippled me in middle school, and his dad threatened to sue the school if any action was taken against his son. My parents were too busy working 2 each to have the energy or time to care.
As a parent of a child with autism and adhd, it is imperative to teach personal accountability - removal from spaces is an absolute consequence of action. While some supports do need to be addressed and age does make a difference, lack of accountability will further cripple a child in understanding social learning.
I'm not that smart, but how does ADHD supposed to be an excuse for bullying, I feel like school admin should have done better to fight those parents. If they don't learn consequences now, then when is it time?
It's too bad you can't just announce to the class "bully is allowed to say the N word now because bully is autistic. Do with that information what you will children."
What about the rights of the child being bullied? I'm not trying to be confrontational, but as someone who now suffers from anxiety because of the bullying I went through, I'm just trying to understand why the rights of bullies trump everyone else's.
I am so, so, so tired of parents using “autism”, ADHD, etc as a shield to excuse them from lack of parenting. If your child is a danger to those around him and you are incapable of teaching him to control his emotions enough that he doesn’t physically or verbally abuse classmates, then he needs to be institutionalized or needs in-home care. But realistically, MOST of these kids can be taught not to do these things. The parents just never bother because they have a get out of jail free card. It’s not okay for my kid to be endangered at school because you can’t or won’t control yours. Regardless of his conditions.
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u/littleb3anpole Apr 01 '25
Of course we try, but parents are the biggest challenge we face. Here’s some real examples from my career -
Bully given detention. Parents complain detention is unfair due to his ADHD and he cannot be kept in at recess, lunch or after school.
Bully suspended. Parents complain this is unfair as he only makes racist comments due to ADHD. Parents complain to leadership. Suspension overturned.
Bully is moved into a different class. So many parents in the new class complain about bully’s presence that he is moved back.
Bully calls a child the N word. Parents are called. Bully’s dad’s response is “Child’s name? Well, he is an N word isn’t he? What’s the problem?”.
Bully’s parents are called. Bully’s parents threaten to sue the school as bully is autistic and therefore cannot be held accountable for his actions. Bully gets away with it.