RICHMOND, Calif. – On a recent afternoon at Nystrom Elementary School, fourth grade teacher Rodney LaFleur asked his class to read along with him during a lesson on the American Revolution. Before he could finish, he noticed one boy who didn’t have the reading material on his desk staring across the room. LaFleur told him to pay attention, and the boy pulled out the crumpled reading assignment.
“Go to the closet,” LaFleur, 25, told him. The student had been warned already that day to stay on task, and LaFleur was frustrated. The open closet, filled with textbooks, dodgeballs and signs about managing emotions – “write about it” and “stretch or exercise” – is where LaFleur sends students who are disruptive and off-task.
A few minutes later, LaFleur directed his students to write a summary of what they read aloud and share it with their tablemates. But as he walked over to talk to the boy he’d sent to the closet, some students immediately abandoned the assignment. Some began singing TikTok songs. Others yelled about what they did over their February vacation. One girl played with the Smarties candies she brought into class for Valentine’s Day.
LeFleur looked on, exhausted. Crucial minutes of learning time during a year meant to catch kids up from pandemic learning loss had gone to waste yet again.
Three years after schools across the nation were shuttered because of COVID-19, educators say they are still struggling to teach kids skills they lost out on during remote learning while managing a surge in post-pandemic misbehavior. More than 70% of 1,000 educators said in a recent national survey that students are misbehaving more now than they did before the pandemic in 2019. That's a slightly larger share than those who said the same in 2021.
The spike in outbursts, fidgeting and nonstop chatter in classrooms coincides with a national mental health crisis. American pediatricians during the pandemic went as far as to call it a national emergency. A recent survey from the Pew Research Center found 40% of parents with kids under 18 said they are “extremely or very worried that their children might struggle with anxiety or depression at some point.”
Many kids lost loved ones to COVID, saw their parents lose jobs and witnessed or experienced abuse. Remote schooling led to kids spending countless hours in front of their screens in isolation from teachers and friends.
Teachers are under pressure to help students make up for what they haven’t learned, and kids feel their stress. The combination has led to a pronounced rise in students expressing anger or sadness by lashing out and being disruptive at school.
“Anytime we’ve got a chaotic structure and high expectations of ourselves, it’s very easy for that to come out in disruptions,” said Kent McIntosh, an associate professor in the College of Education at the University of Oregon. “What on the outside can look like defiant behavior is sometimes a student’s best bet to get needs met in the moment.”
Teachers and students overall need more training on how to manage social and emotional well-being to cope, said Celeste Malone, president of the National Association of School Psychologists. One way educators can prevent and manage disruptions is by fostering trusting relationships with their students, she said.
Many educators said they had no idea how to handle the rise in misbehavior this year. They sent kids to other classrooms or administrative offices to be consoled by someone else, worked longer hours to try to counsel children on their own, set up physical boxes for kids to anonymously share their complaints and ramped up lessons in managing emotions.
Elsewhere, teachers doubled down on controlling their classrooms in ways that research has shown can be problematic and discriminatory against Black and Latino kids: issuing multiple referrals, suspending or expelling students, ticketing kids and disciplining them to a point where they face arrest. The Biden administration in late May issued a letter to public schools emphasizing their responsibility to follow civil rights guidance, which calls for nondiscrimination in student discipline. The letter highlighted several cases where the Education and Justice departments held schools across the nation accountable for violations.
Several states and school boards this year brought back or are considering reviving harsher disciplinary policies, such as requiring schools to suspend or expel kids. Before the pandemic, there was a movement away from those practices. That was in part a response to concerns about discrimination against Black and Latino students who were being excessively removed from a learning environment. Some lawmakers have cited the pleas from teachers as a reason to resurrect harsh discipline policies.
“Unfortunately, it’s a fallback to a position we had in the 80’s and 90’s,” said Thalia González, a professor of law at University of California College of the Law, San Francisco. But these quick fix options that remove kids from classrooms don’t lead to long-term solutions, she said.
Severe disciplinary practices this year – that largely predate the pandemic – also included school officials calling police who may ticket or arrest students and corporal punishment, despite criticism from child behavioral experts.
“Anytime you’re thinking about removing a student from the classroom, that’s a consequential decision. Sometimes we think sending a kid to the hallway is a break for them, but it’s really embarrassing,” McIntosh said. “And it’s teaching them the unintended lesson that maybe the classroom, and maybe the school, is not for them.”
At Downer Elementary School in San Pablo, California, many days in Wendy Gonzalez’s fourth grade class this year went like this: She would start a lesson on math from a new curriculum meant to help kids speed up learning. Before Gonzalez, 45, would get very far, a misbehaving student from another class would end up in her room for counsel. Gonzalez’s former Principal Chris Read said he directed teachers this year to prioritize building relationships with kids.
“These are kids who spent most of their formative years – kindergarten, first grade, second grade, third grade, when you’re supposed to be learning social skills – not learning them. They don’t have those social skills,” Gonzalez said. “They don’t know how to talk to each other. They don’t know how to communicate. They’re always arguing, fighting, yelling.”
On the opposite coast in Alexandria, Virginia, Daisy Andonyadis, a third-grade teacher at Cora Kelly School for Science, Math and Technology, gives her kids daily lessons on how to deal with their emotions and interact with others as a preventive measure. Lessons meant to teach kids how to manage their emotions are under attack, however, largely by people who say those skills should be taught at home and not at the schoolhouse.
“Sometimes I want to stop academics to focus on the social-emotional piece,” Andonyadis said. “It’s more being a therapist than sometimes a teacher.”
The National Association of School Psychologists recommends teachers keep classrooms in order by helping kids manage their behavior in ways that model and reinforce positive behaviors and involve students’ families.
Malone, González and others who see one-on-one attention as a solution also say schools should spend more on professional counselors to give students that help at school. Some schools spent COVID relief dollars on counselors, school psychologists and other mental health services, but others have lost counselors, and many teachers say they’re still doing the brunt of the emotional work and need even more help.
Some schools turned to approaches like restorative justice, which focus on mediation instead of punishment, this year.
At Nystrom Elementary School, Principal Jamie Allardice said this year’s fourth graders are especially prone to misbehavior since their return to the school from remote learning as third graders.
LaFleur said five or six students made frequent visits to the closet in his class this year.
“Sometimes I wonder if I complain too much about student behaviors. Am I being too critical of their actions, too zealous of my pursuit of an orderly classroom?” LaFleur wrote in April, in a journal USA TODAY asked him to keep about his work. “But at the same time, the stakes are so high for many of my students. So many of them are not proficient at grade-level standards and a large portion are several grade levels behind.”
LaFleur, who is considering leaving teaching after this year, said while it’s not ideal, if he continues teaching, he will keep sending students to the closet when they interrupt his class.
Contributing: Alia Wong, USA TODAY
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