State Legislatures Are Banning Things Schools Can't Run Without

State legislatures are out of control with some of the laws they're passing about education, restricting educators from doing things that we have always done and that we need to do, right?

Like schooling is experimental without some of these things that are now being banned.

Like in a lot of states, it's illegal to take away recess.

I think that one we can work around because, you know, students should get recess and students can, instead of having like regular recess, they can have recesses modified in some way where they still get some exercise.

but it's still a consequence.

It's also very common now to ban out of school suspension at the state level for almost all offenses, maybe with some exceptions.

And when you can't suspend students, then you're missing a very real safety valve when it comes to dangerous behavior or extremely disruptive behavior.

Now we're also hearing that holds any kind of restraint is being banned by legislatures.

We're also hearing that leaving a student by themselves in a room, evacuating the rest of the class and the teacher and the other students going somewhere else is illegal because that's isolation.

Blocking a student from leaving the classroom and running out into traffic is illegal sometimes.

You know, like we're having the, you know, piece by piece.

Everything that you have to do, especially to keep young children safe and to protect students and teachers from violence, like piece by piece, everything is getting banned.

And even when it comes to academics, giving zeros, I mean, I don't think there are any state laws about zeros yet, but like we're slowly dismantling everything, every piece of accountability, every...

protection for safety that makes schooling viable and what's happening is special interest groups are saying you know what we're upset about this particular issue we have one cause like i saw an investigative report on the use of restraint and certainly there's probably room for improvement on restraint but you know when we're wholesale banning things that may be misused in some cases, but exists for a reason, right?

Like one of the reasons that students get restrained is that they're engaged in self injurious behavior, right?

Like it's really unpleasant to think about, but if you have a student who's like bashing their head against the wall, you need to restrain them to be able to stop them from doing that and keep them safe.

And when we restrict educators ability to do things like that that are necessary, then school becomes experimental we don't really know how to do this we don't even know if it's possible to run school with all of these constraints and nobody is really responsible for doing that except principals and teachers and the other school staff who actually have to live with the consequences of all these policies right the the lobbyists and special interest groups who went to the legislators and said, hey, pass this law, ban this practice.

We don't like it.

They don't have to live with it.

They don't have to live with it in schools.

The legislators don't have to live with this.

They don't have to deal with the consequences of this.

And I think as educators, we have to be the ones to speak up and say, you know what?

We're not going to do anything illegal.

But it's also not possible to follow this law and actually run schools successfully.

We need this law.

I need a law that says I can block a kindergartner from running out the door into traffic.

I need a law that says if a student punches a teacher, they do have to get suspended.

This is not something that we can just send them back to class.

And I think we're just seeing the erosion of every measure that we need to keep students safe.

And I think we've got to demand them back.

I don't know that there's an easy way to do this, but I think we have to kind of unite our voices and speak up.

And like, if you are put in a position of responsibility where you don't actually have the responsibility you need to fulfill that responsibility, like as educators, we're in loco parentis, we're in the place of parents and parents can do things that educators cannot do.

And there are some things that should be that way.

Certainly, I'm not a fan of corporal punishment or anything like that in schools, but we do need certain abilities to keep students safe, especially when it comes to restricting physical movement, keeping students safe, out of traffic at the very least and protecting students from violence and protecting faculty and things like that.

So let me know what you think about this.

What can we do to roll back some of these just really aggressive laws that states are passing to restrict educators from things that they actually need to do for good reason?

Let me know what you think.