When the Police Come for a Teacher

Because of Lunch Girls Gone Wild

When, as an out-of-classroom teacher, I inadvertently became the principal’s right-hand man at A. Elementary, I found myself in more than a few sticky situations.

I had no training as an administrator, yet under his direction, because he was so short-handed, I kept being recruited to assist with student discipline and crowd control at the school. Lunchtime was the worst.

The mealtime vibe in A. Elementary’s school cafeteria felt similar to a refugee camp when the bags of U.N. rice arrive from the helicopters. Regardless of the easily predicted chaos in this daily moment of feeding, it was also often the time when the shortage of staff to supervise the children was most acute because staff was at lunch, too.

This one particular year, School Food Services had once again changed the lunch distribution process. Some district numbskull decided that each child should possess a lunch card that they would be required to swipe at some point-of-sale terminal before the lunch ladies could hand over the lunch trays.

Of course, doofuses who don’t work with large amounts of small children had designed this onerous, unwieldy process without regard to on-the-ground logistics. Somehow, handing hungry, impatient five-year-olds sharp-edged objects to fiddle with while they wait in long, snaking lines to get their food seemed like a good idea.

This one time a kindergartener, unsurprisingly, decided that trying to slice her classmates with the edge of her laminated lunch card would be fantastic fun (who could’ve predicted that?). Some of the children were annoyed by her while others were laughing along as they jumped out of the way, trying to avoid her swipes. Her playing was not helping the lunch line move efficiently along.

When I noticed the disruption, I walked over and scolded the little girl, demanding she hand over her card to me. She refused. So I snatched that bullshit out of her hands before she could even realize what was happening using a Kung-fu-master-type of maneuver she didn’t see coming. She was surprised and pissed by how quickly I was able to take the card away from her. Even I was sort of impressed by my quick dexterity.

In retaliation, she threw herself onto the ground in move that could only be but a precursor to the Death Drops done by drag queens seen a decade later on RuPaul’s Drag Race. On the ground she started screaming and crying, throwing her head back as if Satan had grown weary of his possession and wanted out of her body but was trapped.

After having been properly trained, I now know that, one, she probably thought that my taking her card meant she was not going to eat and, two, I should have left the child on the floor to exhaust her frenzy. I should’ve removed the audience of kiddie lunch-goers by rerouting the line around her, moving everyone along, with a “There’s nothing to see here folks, keep moving, keep moving” announcement. I also should’ve made sure that as she writhed on the floor no objects stood around her that she could potentially bang her head up against. I should’ve just ignored her tantrum until the fireworks spent themselves. Shoulda’, coulda’, woulda’. Hindsight, and training, are 20/20.

Instead, I grabbed her by the wrist, lifted her up off the floor, and dragged the screaming banshee all way back to the main office so we could call her mother. Wait ‘til mama hears about this, I thought confidently. As we made our way toward the main office, she thrashed and wriggled, trying to escape my grip, us both tugging at each other as if we were conjoined twins trying to storm off in opposite directions.

Guess whose nails were not as trimmed as they should’ve been?

Once we arrived at the main office, I phoned her mom and told her about the incident, mistakenly thinking the mother was going to obviously side with me and reprimand the little girl for her outrageous behavior. However, when the mother arrived at the school, I soon realized where the little girl had inherited her penchant for tantrums. Mama was not happy with me. As she entered the office, her face drooped with concern, then perked up into a righteous wrath when she found out I had dragged her daughter to the office from the cafeteria. She then inspected her child like she was authenticating a canvass of sixteenth-century Flemish art.

Nothing major, but the tiniest speck of red was found on the girl’s forearm, presumably from contact with my fingernails. (I can imagine District lawyers with arms crossed, shaking their heads and saying, “Tsk, tsk, tsk, we told you so.”)

Discovering the scratch, the mother promptly called the police, crying into the phone like she had suffered an extremely late-term abortion.

The principal did not back me up, of course.

He had long had me in his administrative crosshairs, and this only sharpened his focus. He always seemed to default on calling the police on his staff anytime the opportunity arose, I’m sure with the secret sadistic hope that they’d be placed in cuffs in front of him. When the police arrived, they saw the mole hill being made into a mountain and told the principal that the incident was not a criminal matter but an administrative one. They left without arresting me.

I could almost detect the principal’s smile twitching with happiness under his walrus-like mustache as he now realized he had me trapped in his lair of rebuke. Later on, he took the opportunity to generously delve into the technocratic language of administrative memos like it was jar of Halloween candy. He decided his sweetest choice of reprimand would be to charge me with dispensing corporal punishment on a child. The accidental speck of a scratch was treated as a Singaporean flogging.

He was such a dick. But my misjudgment had handed him the advantage. Of course, I was reprimanded, once again, and this time there was little counterargument on my behalf. I had laid my hands on the girl and that was indisputable.

However, since I growing accustomed to his tactics, I had learned that in the reprimand process I possessed some minimal contractual rights, and I could counter-argue his chastisement not only with rebuttals, but also with requests for assistance and clarifications. I then explicitly demanded training in order to help myself adhere to his directives. If I was going to be put in administrative positions of disciplining students, I wanted to be trained on how to handle violent outbursts.

Through some other colleagues, I had heard of a workshop called Pro-Act meant for teaching teachers how to handle violent students. My principal wasn’t offering me any pointers or mentoring, so I decided to formally demand some.

It was the best, smartest thing I could have ever asked for.

I was sent to one of the most amazing trainings I ever had as a teacher. In fact, I liked the training so much I attended it multiple times over the course of my career. Whenever I could finagle the district to pay for the expensive workshop, I signed my ass up.

Non-Violent Crisis Intervention

With a district as large, diverse, and urban as mine, you have to imagine that a multitude of trainings are taking place all the time on every subject ranging from standards-based science instruction to standardized test administration to crossing guard initiations. The training I requested had changed its name from Pro-Act to Non-Violent Crisis Intervention. A private company had trademarked the name and offered their patented techniques to persons working in the medical, correctional, and now, the educational fields.

The stated philosophy of NCI is the promotion of the care, welfare, safety and security of care receivers and staff. Schools have become much more violent places of employment and in need of expertise usually required of such volatile industries as mental health and corrections. Let that sink in for a minute—teachers are being trained in the same skills and techniques needed by the likes of prison guards and nurses who work with mentally ill patients.

In the training, participants learn about the nuances of body language, the difference between verbal and physical interactions, tactics of de-escalation, how to handle refusals, how personal space is cultural and gendered, and how physical interventions are a last resort only to be used when imminent danger is presented. It was a highly detailed workshop where we participants defined such basic terms as grab and kick, brainstormed alternatives to physical interaction with students, and conversed about how it is important to psychologically give back a person in crisis their sense of emotional control after they have lost it. The experience was an eye-opening, superb-level training that should be mandated and offered to all public school teachers. Despite its expense, it would probably save the District bags of money from lawsuit payouts.

All day long, the workshops’ participants practiced various violent scenarios. For instance, what do you do if a child is latched onto your arm with their teeth like some rabid canine? We were taught to first attempt to surprise the biter without touching them by using a loud roar or yell in the hopes that they would voluntarily release. If they remain latched on, unfazed by that element of surprise, there was an upward finger push meant to help unhook their clench.

The training was that specific and included what I imagine to be the not-too-dissimilar de-escalation tactics employed by FBI hostage negotiators. One of the most helpful strategies that I wished I had learned from the beginning of my teaching career is removing an audience when a child is in crisis. Many times, a student in meltdown is fueled by a group of onlookers whose stares and commentary only add gasoline to the fire. But instead of a teacher attempting to remove a twisting, shouting, emotional child—an approach that most assuredly would go wrong—it’s simpler for the instructor to ask the class of looky-loos to relocate to the library or the playground or the cafeteria or any another common area out-of-sight. This simple, safer alternative to manhandling an out-of-control, distressed student was never presented to me in any professional development or by any district personnel as an option until this one workshop late in my career.

Teacher professional development too often primarily focuses on academics, relegating classroom management to a hodgepodge of makeshift systems and half-assed strategies made up by teachers as they go along in their career. Credentialing classes, workshops, and district memos often dictate what not to do without providing safer alternatives for what to do in violent situations. These legalistic, doctrinaire “thou-shalt-nots” leave a vacuum that educators can often fill with misunderstandings and mistakes.

At A. Elementary, Ms. S., the school’s psychologist, and I once had to babysit a third grader caught in the violent throes of an emotional crisis.

His personal life was in some sort of turmoil that included marital problems between his parents and possible abandonment by his mother. The exact circumstances of his home life were murky to us. He would act out violently at school on a daily basis.

One day, he was particularly distraught, and Ms. S. and I had been recruited to try to keep him from running out of the school and into the street. We had him contained in a small office while he stomped in circles, wailing unceasingly. He wasn’t attempting to flee, and he wasn’t hurting himself or us, per se, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t calm down. He started fucking up the room like he was a single looter in a lonely riot, throwing papers, ripping up books, crashing office supplies against the floor and walls. At first, we were both wise enough to not attempt to lay our hands on him, letting him spin in a circular torment as if he was a plastic bag caught in a whirlwind. Instead, Ms. S. and I bounced around the room, jumping ahead of his destructive path, removing sharp or heavy objects out of the way and placing them out of his reach.

Once we had cleared the room of the most dangerous objects, the boy continued to circle and circle, crying and throwing paper around like an inexhaustible tornado. There was no imminent danger to anyone; the scenario was simply loud and getting very messy. For an hour, he went on and on.

The vice-principal eventually called the Psychiatric Emergency Team to assist us. As we awaited their arrival, having exhausted all other options, Ms. S. and I sat on a bookcase and watched the child scream and stomp in what felt like perpetuity, as if we were waiting for a malfunctioning toy to run out of batteries. Our own adrenaline rush having worn off, the novelty of the tantrum now expended, we slipped into the humdrum chatter of colleagues talking about our plans for our weekend and our upcoming summer. We got to know each other a bit more finding out about each other’s life growing up as if we were meeting each other for the first time all the while this little boy spun in an anguish that had something to do with his wrecked home life.

I felt sorry for the kid. I really did. But I also felt sorry for us as professionals. He was in an obvious torment, and we were helpless to comfort him. He ignored all our entreaties as if we weren’t even in the room.

I could feel our empathy dissipating into a banal everydayness of institutional professionalism that is often overwhelmed by so many kids with so many problems. After a while, the molestations, the negligence, the poverty, the hunger, the sadness, the drugs, the domestic abuse become so commonplace, teachers become inured to the point where I once shared a laugh with a principal as we both filled out separate child abuse reports for two boys who had the same first names. I had to correct my principal at one point saying something out loud like, “No, I’m not talking about the kid whose father pointed a gun at him, that is a different Steven!” We laughed at the ridiculous statements we have to make over the course of working in our profession. I’m sure this is the reason police officers get so much flack for their seemingly uncaring and sometimes flippant attitudes when in the line of duty. All the shit we see and hear about becomes banal.

The vice principal eventually wanted to move the troubled boy to her office, which was a spare and uncluttered space with cushy seats for him to sit on. She asked if I or Ms. S. were NCI trained. “I am!” I said, maybe a little too excitedly.

I was eager to finally put my NCI training to use. The vice-principal wanted to execute a two-person forward transfer, where two adults work in coordination to immobilize a child by interlocking their arms with the student on either side and knocking them off balance with the weight of their bodies and then maneuvering the child forward. Turns out, despite practiced training, a two-person forward transfer is much more difficult to execute in real life, even on a small third grader.

As the vice principal and I took our positions and got the child in the hold, when we moved forward, we began to jostle around as if we were running a six-legged race. Awkward and sputtering, we bounced like a drunken three-headed monster. It was still safer than if we had just tried to pick the kid up and move him, but I was out of breath and tired afterward. We successfully relocated him to her office and had him sit in a cushy chair. The boy just cried and cried and cried for his poor little life.

By the time the Psychiatric Emergency Team arrived, the child still had not calmed down. They strapped him into a gurney and hauled him away as if he had a heart attack, but I suspect what he really was suffering was some sort of incommunicable, unamenable heartbreak.

Ms. S. and I cleaned up the mess he left, getting paid as much as if we had spent the day actually educating children.

I don’t know whatever happened to him.

It was just another school day.