The school shooting in Newport News, Virginia, involving a six-year-old who shot his teacher, fell from the headlines before we could learn our lesson from it.
An article in The 74, a website dedicated to education news and commentary, was titled, “After three weeks and a flood of new details, Virginia school shooting grows more unthinkable.” According to the reporter, with every new detail about the events leading to a six-year-old shooting his teacher, the incident “becomes harder to understand.”
If only that were the case.
Unfortunately, the recent shooting is all too easy to understand. Teachers put their finger on a root cause quickly. At a school board meeting shortly after, teachers inveighed against the school board for its lenient school discipline policies. “It was just a matter of time before something like this happened,” one teacher said. “Teachers often joke about how students get sent into the office for discipline and come back ten minutes later with a snack and pat on the back.”
This is a common teacher complaint in school districts that eschew traditional discipline in favor of a social justice effort to fight the so-called “school-to-prison pipeline.”
Thanks to an Obama-era Dear Colleague Letter, it is now conventional administrative wisdom that teachers are biased against minority students and students with disabilities, that consequences harm students, and that discipline policies are successful insofar as they reduce disciplinary statistics. A week after the shooting, Newport News’s superintendent boasted that “the number of disciplinary incidents and student infractions across the school division declined by 40 percent.”
But, as one teacher said, “ask any teacher...why discipline incidents declined. Infraction numbers are down because incidents aren’t always officially reported. The message we are being given is that suspensions count against us.” School administrators who, like the Newport News elementary school principal, pride themselves on being “anti-racist,” blame teachers for misbehavior, sweep it under the rug, and claim credit for improving discipline even as conditions deteriorate.
Understand this, and the actions by administrators at the elementary school stop being inexplicable.
According to the lawyer of the teacher who was shot, administrators were warned three times that the six-year-old had a gun. The last time, administrators allegedly told an employee that he couldn’t search the student and should just wait it out because the school day was almost over. Such behavior makes no sense if you assume that school administrators put safety first. But it starts to make sense when you understand the pressure to prioritize statistics over safety. Such profound negligence is almost certainly not accidental, but rather policy-induced.
The other should-be-inexplicable-but-isn’t detail is the fact that this student was in a traditional classroom. According to reports, his misbehavior was so severe that the school required a parent to accompany him to class. The week the shooting occurred was the first week the parent’s presence was no longer required.
According to reports, this student has a severe disability. While education privacy laws prohibit confirmation, it seems all but certain that he had an “emotional and behavioral disability” (EBD). Over the past decade, the social justice left has pressed school districts to be “inclusive” of students with disabilities. When the disability in question is physical or related to learning difficulties, it might be best to keep a student in a traditional classroom rather than educate him in a special classroom or at a specialized school.
But “inclusion” becomes extremely problematic with EBD students. School districts are pressured to keep the most extremely disruptive students in regular classrooms. Then school district administrators are pressured to sweep their misbehavior under the rug.
As I argued in Why Meadow Died, it was the combination of these two policy pressures that enabled the Parkland school shooting five years ago. School shooters tend to display plenty of disturbing behavior before carrying out their attacks. If you press school officials to ignore the signs, you all but invite disaster. This is, according to a lawsuit, what happened in Oxford, Michigan, where school administrators allegedly willfully refused to refer a student to law enforcement after being warned he had a gun. And it is, according to this teacher’s lawyer, what happened in Newport News.
It’s a tragic reality that some students pose a clear and direct threat. So long as social justice policies pressure schools to keep those students in normal classrooms and ignore the warning signs, we should not be surprised when the “unthinkable” happens again and again.
Editor’s note: This was first published by the Washington Examiner.
