Schools Confront a Wave of Student Misbehavior, Driven by Months of Remote Learning

School districts across the U.S. say they are seeing a surge of student misbehavior in the return to in-person learning, after months of closures and disruptions due to the pandemic.

Schools have seen an increase in both minor incidents, like students talking in class, and more serious issues, such as fights and gun possession.

In Dallas, disruptive classroom incidents have tripled this year compared with pre-pandemic levels, school officials said. The Albuquerque, N.M., superintendent sent a letter to parents warning of a “rise in violence and unacceptable behaviors posted to social media” that have disrupted classes. The National Association of School Resource Officers said it has seen a rise in gun-related incidents in schools.

Some schools are responding to the disciplinary problems by dispatching more staffers to patrol school grounds or by hiring more counselors. Others are reducing student suspensions, or in Dallas, eliminating them altogether in favor of counseling. Some districts have enacted what they call mental-health days, closing schools around holidays to give students and administrators a break. Peoria, Ill., is planning a special school that would be dedicated to students with issues caused by the pandemic.

Educators at disadvantaged schools, often in low-income neighborhoods, said they had anticipated students would return to in-person learning with mental-health scars from Covid-19.

Parents in the relatively affluent suburb of Cherry Creek, Colo., outside Denver, said they were surprised to receive a letter from their school district in November that expressed concern over recent increases in the number of behavioral incidents involving high-school students.

Peter Faustino, a school psychologist in New York who serves on the board of directors for the National Association of School Psychologists, said school psychologists across the country have seen roughly the same volume of mental-health complaints and behavioral issues in the first three months of the school year that used to occur in an entire academic year.

L.V. Stockard Middle School, in the Dallas neighborhood of Oak Cliff, used to suspend students who misbehave. It now sends them to what the district calls a reset center, typically in unused classrooms and sometimes in outdoor sessions, where they get counseling for between one to three days.

One day in October, three students who had gotten into trouble sat on beanbags arranged in a circle outdoors near the school’s entrance. Pierre Fleurinor, the school’s reset center coordinator, pulled up a bean bag and sat down with them.

He began with some chatty questions: Which superhero is their favorite and why? What is their favorite cereal? The three students passed a ball among them to indicate who was speaking.

Then Mr. Fleurinor turned serious, asking what they were doing to avoid the misbehavior that had led to their disciplinary problems.

“Talking about it like this helps,” said Masiah Jones, 12 years old. The seventh-grader had landed in Mr. Fleurinor’s reset center for repeatedly talking with another girl while her teacher was giving lessons. She had never been in trouble before, she said, and had wanted to catch up with her friend, whom she hadn’t seen since the pandemic began.

Time away from school during the pandemic has set back many students, Mr. Fleurinor said. “In that year off, we lost a lot of social maturity. So, they don’t know how to express their emotions,” he said.

Excerpted from “Schools Confront a Wave of Student Misbehavior, Driven by Months of Remote Learning” in the Wall Street Journal. Read the full article online.

Source: Wall Street Journal | Schools Confront a Wave of Student Misbehavior, Driven by Months of Remote Learning, https://www.wsj.com/articles/schools-student-misbehavior-remote-learning-covid-11639061247 | © 2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

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