6 OctOber 24 - 30, 2024 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents Dangerous Minds Teachers are being literally battered by a post-COVID mental health crisis among students. By Emma Ruby T he bruising around Candra Rog- ers’ right eye hadn’t completely faded by the time she addressed the media in a Corsicana ISD boardroom on Aug. 27. Twelve days earlier, the Collins Interme- diate School Assistant Principal had re- sponded to a radio call for assistance from a behavioral teacher. When Rogers ap- proached the classroom, the teacher, who was reportedly assaulted by a student who remained in the room, stood outside with some students. Rogers entered the class- room alone and found an “irate” student surrounded by a “ransacked” room. As another administrator entered the classroom behind Rogers, the student began throwing chairs at her. She caught one and used it to block the others, but when the stu- dent picked up a wooden hanger she was unable to react in time. “The hanger hit me in my right eye and knocked it out of the socket,” Rogers told the media. “I grabbed my face while blood was pouring out of my head and stumbled out of the classroom door.” Rogers was airlifted to Parkland Medical Center and underwent surgery. Doctors were able to reinsert her eye, but her sight remains lost, and doctors believe Rogers’ eye may eventually have to be removed. The stu- dent was released to his parents and banned from returning to campus. Less than two weeks after the assault, Rogers sat, surrounded by family, and sounded the alarm on a growing trend of vi- olence and aggression in schools that advo- cates are concerned is increasingly targeted against educators. “Our safety is important, too,” Rogers said. “We should not fear being in the class- room with an aggressive student.” The rate of disciplinary infractions taking place on school campuses across North Texas has spiked in the years since the CO- VID-19 pandemic, data provided to the Ob- server shows. In Plano ISD, 70 assaults were commit- ted by students against school employees during the 2023–24 school year, compared to just 24 in the 2018–19 school year. On- campus assaults against other students rose to 168 in the last school year, whereas the years leading up to COVID-19 saw numbers in the 30s. Plano ISD provided the number of recorded incidents for 13 types of disci- plinary infractions — incidents like assaults, drug possession, weapons possession and robbery — over six school years beginning in 2018. Every infraction increased in the years fol- lowing the COVID-19 pandemic. The number of disciplinary infractions committed by Plano ISD students in the 2018–19 school year in- creased by 140% by the 2023–24 school year. Dallas ISD recorded 653 on-campus as- saults in 2023–24, just slightly less than the 662 in the prior school year. In the school years leading up to COVID-19, that number was in the 380s. A malware attack against Fort Worth ISD in 2020 resulted in the district losing its pre- COVID data. The information provided to the Observer did not distinguish between specific types of incidents. Instead, a yearly total that encompasses all infraction types was submitted. In 2023–24, the district re- ported 653 behavioral incidents. Only two years prior, that number was 329. According to state data, there were fewer enrolled students in each of the three dis- tricts in the 2022–23 school year than in the 2018–19 school year. “If you talk to teachers long enough, they’re going to tell you that right now disci- pline is one of the leading concerns in their profession. Student behaviors are going un- checked, and they’re escalating to a point where a lot of them are becoming violent,” said Stephen Poole, director of the United Educators Association. Throughout the country, schools at all age levels and demographics are enduring spikes in behavioral challenges, he added. Prior to the pandemic, 65% of teachers re- ported experiencing at least one instance of verbal harassment or threatening behavior by a student, research by the American Psy- chological Association shows. In 2024, that number has risen to 80%. The same study reports that teachers are experiencing more physical attacks by both students and par- ents than they did pre-pandemic. Poole, whose organization represents teachers across 46 school districts in North Texas, said the number of teachers who tell him they are concerned about discipline in schools “grows every day.” And for many of them, it’s becoming a dealbreaker. “I just talked to a teacher yesterday who is eligible for retirement,” Poole said. “She didn’t think she was going to retire for a cou- ple more years, but she just can’t take an- other day of what she’s been experiencing in the classroom.” Mental Health Crisis in the Classroom S andy Kramer, who has taught in Fort Worth ISD for decades, had never be- fore witnessed anything like last year’s graduating class. The group of stu- dents began their high school education on Zoom because of the pandemic, missing out on the socialization that comes with transi- tioning from middle school to high school. “Last year’s graduating class was the most broken group of students I’ve ever seen,” Kramer, whose name has been changed because of her current employ- ment with the district, said. “They were unfocused and anxious. The overriding sense I got was that they were anxious about a lot of things.” The country is experiencing an adoles- cent mental health crisis that began years before the pandemic, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows. But social isolation, unpredictable academic interruptions and the unprecedented amount of lives lost during the height of the pandemic could have compounded the per- sistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness that almost half of all teens surveyed re- ported experiencing in 2021, says Dr. Carol Tamminga, a psychiatrist with the Texas Children’s Mental Health Care Consortium. The 86th Texas Legislature created the con- sortium in an effort to combat the state’s ad- olescent mental health crisis. Even younger children, especially those who were fully isolated throughout the pandemic, began presenting to doctors with increased rates of anxiety and depres- sion in the years after lockdown, she says. As with most conditions, mental health ill- nesses present differently in children than they do in adults. The resulting behavior often lines up with the outbursts that edu- cators are pointing to as problematic, Tam- minga added. “Children may not be able to articulate [exactly what they’re feeling] so they may present as being fussy,” Tamminga said. “[The pandemic] was really quite severe, and children don’t really know how to say, ‘I’m feeling severely depressed.’ So they would have behavioral disorders or they would have what people might call acting out.” In 2022, Tamminga noted a shift in the statewide discourse surrounding adoles- cent mental health after the Robb Elemen- tary School mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Nineteen students and two teachers were killed by a local teen who, prior to the shooting, had expressed suicidal ideation and violent tendencies — behaviors that should have been obvious red flags to each of the adults in his life, noted a state inves- tigative report released months after the shooting. But in less extreme cases, Tamminga rec- ognizes that schools often lack the resources to handle behavioral challenges or track red flags on their own, especially those caused by a mental illness. Schools are facing a se- vere shortage in mental health pro- Illustration by Alex Nabaum | UNFAIR PARK | >> p8
