In Brief:
- Schools are struggling with emotional and behavioral issues among young children affected by the pandemic and opioid epidemic.
- A new policy in West Virginia gives teachers a process for removing persistently disruptive or violent elementary school students from their classrooms. The students would get behavioral interventions, or, if problems continue, be removed longer term and placed into an alternative education setting.
- Putting the policy into action requires more alternative education offerings and counselors than many West Virginian schools or counties currently have, raising questions on how it will work.
If you ask teachers and principals in West Virginia, they’ll tell you — the kids are not all right. Elementary school children are acting up more, school personnel say, with behaviors ranging from disruptive to violent, and teachers, parents and legislators are trying to figure out how to handle it.
It’s hard to say how widespread the issue is. National figures suggest a long-term downtick in student-on-teacher violence. But, anecdotally, teachers say behavior has gotten worse, and nationwide, most schools reported an increase in students’ socioemotional and behavioral challenges in 2022. Seventy-one percent of West Virginia Education Association members said in a November 2023 survey that student behavior was a “very” serious problem; nearly all said it was at least somewhat serious. More than a quarter said they’d never felt this burned out before — not even during COVID-19. When those considering an early departure from the field were asked what possible improvements would induce them to stay, one of the top three fixes they chose was “improve[ments in] school safety and student discipline issues.”
The youngest kids are struggling the most: Reportedly, kindergarteners accounted for nearly one-fifth of battery cases against school employees in the state. “I have heard teachers saying they were never trained how to handle these escalating behaviors in a regular education classroom,” and that they also lack enough special education teachers, counselors and other support staff to help, Villani says.
West Virginia hopes to address the problem with a new state law establishing a process through which teachers can remove violent or disruptive children in levels pre-K through grade 5 from their classroom. The law expands on existing guidelines for removing kids in grades 6-12 from the classroom. The child would get seen by the school counselor, psychologist or other specialist to try to find the root cause of the kid’s behavior and create a plan to correct it. Persistent issues could result in longer-term removal from the classroom.
Other states are worried about behavioral problems, too: Kentucky passed, and Texas is considering passing, measures to make it easier to remove repeatedly disruptive students from the classroom.
“There is, nationally, a large trend towards this more punitive action,” says Tamaya Browder, education policy fellow at the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy.
State Solutions
West Virginia’s law, SB 199, is a turn toward more severe measures for younger children with behavioral issues.
If the child’s behavior doesn’t improve after several weeks on a behavioral improvement plan, the school will put the student either in a behavioral intervention program — if their county has access to one — or else suspend the student. While suspended, the child may undergo an assessment to see if they have special education needs. The suspended student would also need to undergo a risk assessment before they could return to school; in the meantime, they’d be educated via “alternative learning accommodations.” If they return to school and repeat the problematic behavior shortly after returning, they might be expelled for the semester and could attend an alternative learning center.
The law is meant to give teachers more options for dealing with a continually disruptive student, but it’s unclear if there will actually be new funding to implement it, says Mickey Blackwell, executive director of the West Virginia Principals Association, who is also a former principal and former county superintendent. The law doesn’t specify where the money for counselors or more alternative learning centers would come from, and schools have already been worried about declining funding in recent years.
Fewer than half of the state’s counties have alternative learning centers for disruptive kids to go to while removed from the classroom. It’s especially uncommon to have such options for elementary school levels, says Dale Lee, president of the West Virginia Education Association,.
Students could be sent to out-of-county centers, but this may mean long transit times for young kids and their families, and such scheduling hurdles could make it harder for kids to participate in afterschool programs, Browder says. Giving kids online learning at home, instead, may be disengaging or require working parents to find ways to babysit and support their young kids during lessons.
SB 199 expects schools to have a school counselor, school social worker, school psychologist or behavior interventionist to develop behavior improvement plans for the children — but many schools lack a full-time professional. If schools have to turn to a shared, off-site counselor, this would limit the school’s abilities to respond quickly to an issue as they wait for someone to arrive, Blackwell says.
Still, SB 199 is “a great start” with “the right intentions,” Principal Villani says, adding that “[e]very staff member should be provided a safe place to work and every child deserves a safe environment to learn.”
Browder says the version of the law that passed is an improvement over its original draft, which had fewer safeguards against unnecessary suspensions, hadn’t included the school counselor or a behavioral assessment in the process and had involved law enforcement.
But Browder also cautioned that removing a child from a classroom should be the last resort. And safeguards should be put in place to ensure there aren’t disparities around which kids get suspended or permanently removed. Often, suspensions disproportionately fall on students who are male, Black, in foster care, unhoused or have disabilities. Browder also noted the policy doesn’t specify what a risk assessment looks like or how soon it should be completed, potentially leading to different standards and delayed returns to the classroom.
West Virginia reflects a wider trend of expanding use of suspensions.
Two years ago, Kentucky passed a law letting teachers suspend repeatedly disruptive children. More persistent issues could see the student removed permanently from the class and instead put into another classroom, an alternative learning center, or, if the child is deemed to pose a danger, possibly expelled for 12 months.
Texas, meanwhile, is now considering allowing schools to hand down out-of-school suspensions to any child who’s a safety threat or who makes “repeated and significant” classroom disruptions. The bill would loosen previous limits on suspending pre-K through grade 2 children and students who are homeless. Students could be sent to disciplinary alternative education programs for attacking a teacher or making “terroristic” threats.
Rooted in Trauma
The problematic behaviors aren’t coming out of nowhere. “The No. 1 root cause is definitely trauma,” says Principal Villani.
Children nationwide are struggling with impacts of the pandemic and ongoing opioid epidemic on their early experiences, and those born during the pandemic are now at kindergarten age. Isolation and heavy amounts of screen time during the pandemic can have behavioral effects on young kids. And children are coping with effects of trauma from instability or family tragedies during that time.
West Virginia has suffered especially hard from the opioid epidemic. In 2022, the state reportedly had the highest rate of children with neonatal abstinence syndrome in the U.S. The condition is caused by drug exposure in the womb and may cause behavioral problems in children’s early years. The opioid epidemic also can lead to less stability and structure at home, sometimes resulting in children entering foster care.
Many West Virginian children in foster care were removed from homes where drug use was a problem. Entry into foster care rose 117 percent from 2000 to 2021; a 2022 report declared that the state “places four times as many children per capita in the foster care system as the United States as a whole.”
And in 2021-2022, 45 percent of West Virginian children faced at least one adverse childhood experience — a rate higher than in 41 other states.
To respond to students’ behavioral issues, schools, “more than anything else,” need more trained behavioral interventionists, Blackwell says.
Figuring out schools’ counselor shortage will be a key step to solving the problem.
“This [SB 199] is a first step,” Lee says. “Until we address the causes of these disruptions — the causes of these violent behaviors — the mental and emotional state of our students, we're just putting a Band-Aid on the situation. We need to dive down with behavior specialists, with counseling, to see what's causing these disruptions, and then work on helping students with that.”
