School officials need skills to control students

The recent incident, captured on video, showing a student at a Richland County school being flipped in her chair and forcibly removed from a classroom by a sheriff’s deputy is every teacher’s nightmare.

In that case, the teacher could not stop the student from disrupting the class, so an administrator was called. When that didn’t work, the deputy, a school resource officer, was summoned.

Students recorded the officer’s actions, and he subsequently was fired. While it was clear that the student was disrupting the class and refused to quit, the officer’s superiors – not to mention thousands of others who later saw the video online – believed he over-reacted.

That video has been the subject of recent discussions among officials from York County school districts and law enforcement agencies. The central question: What could they have done in a similar situation to avoid the same outcome?

There are no easy or obvious answers to that. Each incident is certain to present unique and often unanticipated challenges. Other students in the classroom could react differently. In the end, a physical confrontation might be the only recourse.

It is reassuring, however, to know that local school officials and law enforcement officers are thinking about solutions, looking at various alternatives and seeking training from experts in defusing classroom confrontations.

In January, local school officials will get training from the Crisis Prevention Institute, based in Milwaukee, Wis., which teaches nonviolent crisis intervention techniques. The training will focus on verbal de-escalation techniques and will include lessons on the thought processes of adolescents and students with special needs.

We hope one of the prime goals of this training will be finding ways to make intervention by law enforcement officers as rare as possible. Criminalizing classroom behavior should be limited to only the most serious situations where those involved are at risk of bodily harm.

It is clear that school strategies already regard the intervention of resource officers as a last resort. And even when officers are called, policies recommend using two officers to reduce the possibility of injury.

Before calling an officer to deal with a non-compliant student, the policy at some schools is to clear the rest of the students from the room. This allows the situation to de-escalate and deprives the student of an audience.

But that, in itself, is an extreme measure. Teachers and administrators essentially have ceded control, and other students are forced to leave their classroom.

We hope the training sessions are primarily aimed at preventing these standoff incidents rather than dealing with them after they occur. Teachers, especially those with less experienced, need tools to help them reduce tensions in the classroom, establish their authority, deflect confrontation, avoid ultimatums, recognize trouble before it escalates out of control, and use peer pressure to help control unruly students.

Again, it is reassuring that school and law enforcement officials recognize the need to anticipate these problems and find methods to deal with them. The January training sessions, by the way, were scheduled before the incident in Richland County occurred.

Order in the classroom and throughout the school is essential. But we hope that school officials can develop strategies to maintain order that utilize police as little as possible and only as a last resort.

Ideally, teachers alone should be able to control their classrooms.

This story was originally published December 5, 2015 at 2:47 PM with the headline "School officials need skills to control students."