If a Kid Is Throwing Up, We Send Them Home — Why Not When They're Throwing Chairs?
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder uses a simple analogy to argue that schools should respond to violent behavior with the same urgency they respond to physical illness.
Key Takeaways
- The analogy is powerful - A vomiting child goes home immediately; a child throwing furniture should too
- Safety is safety - Both situations create unsafe conditions for other students; the response should be equally swift
- Schools can't treat violent behavior as normal - Just as we wouldn't expect a sick child to stay in class, we shouldn't expect other students to learn alongside a violent one
Transcript
If a student is throwing up in the classroom, everybody would agree that student has to go home until they're well enough to attend class, right?
The student cannot learn, nobody else can learn, and everybody else is kind of in danger from the student who's throwing up in the classroom if we don't send that student home.
And I'm wondering why we don't see behavior the same way it's so odd to me that we've allowed our mission as educators to grow into addressing problems that we can't really address like student mental health student behavior there are all these things that like yes we want the student to feel better we want them to do better we want them to just be in a better place but just as a sick kid can't stay at school and learn and we can't really do anything about that like i think the same is true when their behavior is out of control, when they're going through something that just makes it impossible for them to be in class, to be around other people, to be safe at school.
And I think part of taking mental health seriously is recognizing our limitations, right?
This is a professional industry, right?
Like this is a whole profession to deal with mental health, and that's not our profession.
We're in a different profession as educators.
So I think we have to be the ones to draw a professional boundary and say, we are here for education, we are here for our students, but we cannot deal with a stomach bug.
We just can't.
You just have to be at home until that's over with.
And if we have a behavior that is so unsafe that the student cannot learn and other students cannot learn and other students cannot be safe, then we have to not agree to solve that problem that we can't solve anyway.
And I think schools especially have to get out of the business of hiring behavior staff, right?
Like you should have a nurse, you should have a counselor, you should have a psychologist who can help with evaluations and things like that.
But this idea that we should have this whole industry of mental health professionals who are employed by schools doesn't make sense to me.
Like what other medical professions are we hiring staff to work in right like nurse can give first aid nurse can give out medication but that like to me that should kind of be about it and we recognize that when a student has another problem it is their family's job to get them the health care they need whether that's physical health care or mental health care let me know what you think