What are we to make of the shooting of a teacher by her six-year-old student?
A triple storm has turned schools across the nation into powder kegs.
Originally published in the Moultrie News.
On January 6, Newport News, VA, first-grade teacher Abby Zwerner, 25, was intentionally shot by a student during class. The bullet passed through her hand and entered her chest. She is reportedly recovering from life-threatening wounds.
News reports tell a frustrating story of principals brushing off teachers’ pleas for help. This is not an exception in education. It is the standard operating procedure.
In a scenario recycled a thousand times a day, the boy had a history of violent and disruptive behavior only half-heartedly addressed by principals. When he wrote to a teacher that he wanted to light her on fire, the teacher was told by principals to drop it.
The parents’ statement, with wording like “acute disability” and “accommodations”, suggests the shooter was classified as special education. The vast majority of such students are great, but federal laws restrict how schools protect teachers and children from those who are dangerous and defiant. Schools are often forced to give them privileges in the confused hope that indulging them will lessen their volatile behavior. Abby’s shooter was permitted at times to walk around school unsupervised.
Meanwhile, schools have gone all-in on ill-conceived sociological efforts to keep disruptive students in class at all costs.
This triple storm of restrictive federal laws, misguided behavioral fads, and blase principals who find it more convenient to befriend dangerous students than discipline them has resulted in schools across the nation becoming powderkegs for scenarios like Abby’s.
Institutional indifference to school discipline is driving teachers out of the classroom more than any other issue. A 2022 exit survey of South Carolina teachers showed it was the #1 reason they quit. But it's hardly just teachers who are feeling the pain. Last year, Irmo High students walked out of their school to protest discipline problems. A day is soon coming when superintendents and school boards will wake up and ask, “Where did all the teachers go? And why aren’t students learning anything?”
Consider the alleged apathy by Abby’s administrators. On the morning of the shooting, she told a principal that the boy had threatened to beat up another student. The principal did nothing. Abby later texted a loved one that the boy was armed and principals were ignoring it. In all, three different teachers and a fourth employee went to the principals that day with concerns about the boy’s behavior. When one teacher reported that the shooter had shown the gun to a classmate and threatened to shoot him if he told anybody, the principal said to drop the issue since school was almost over and the boy “has little pockets.”
If all that is true, it is not only disrespectful to Abby, but an affront to the courage of the little boy who, under the threat of murder, told the teacher what he saw. Why would that child ever again feel safe in school or trust those who work there?
January 6 was not the first day Abby went to her principals for help. It was the last. One colleague said Abby was “frustrated because she was trying to get help with this child, for this child, and then when she needed help, no one was coming."
Abby is far kinder than me. I’ve been conditioned by the stories of anguished teachers to recoil at phrases like “get help for this child.” Delicately couching frustrations with discipline as “seeking help for the misbehaving student” indicates that it’s not your own life and well-being you’re concerned about. Teachers shouldn’t have to do that. It’s okay to be more worried about your own safety (and sanity) and the innocent children who come to school to learn than about the child who threatens and abuses others.
According to Newport News middle school teacher Cindy Connell, the entire tragedy “is just another example of administrators not listening to the concerns of teachers, and the only reason we’re talking about this one is because Abby Zwerner got shot.”
She’s right. But I hope Abby’s scars will not be in vain. Hopefully what happened to her will ignite change.
And if it doesn’t? Then substitute Abby’s name with another teacher or student — perhaps even one you know — and repeat ad mortem, ad infinitum.
Read the original column here.