Senate Education Committee Chairwoman Amy Grady, Sen. Mike Oliverio, R-Monongalia, and other lawmakers tour Wheeling Park High School in November during traveling legislative interim meetings. (Photo Provided)

CHARLESTON — Lawmakers in West Virginia could take another look addressing school discipline issues as state education officials continue to look at new policies to reduce disparities and deal with issues caused by a bill passed earlier this year.

Speaking by phone Tuesday, Senate Education Committee Chairwoman Amy Grady, R-Mason, said she is working with Senate leadership and other lawmakers to have a bill ready for the 2024 regular session of the Legislature to address concerns teachers have with increasing incidents in schools requiring discipline, including violence against students and teachers.

“When I was a kid, acting out was just not following the teacher’s directions, not sitting correctly, not sitting when you’re supposed to, just doing little ornery things that kids would do. I’m not talking about those things,” Grady said. “When we talk about acting out, we’re talking about threatening behaviors where students are actually threatening teachers, threatening to kill them, threatening to punch them in the face, threatening to do things to them, threatening their peers.”

“They’re actually doing violent things as throwing their computers across the room, flipping desks a lot of times, just grabbing hold of anything they can to throw,” Grady continued. “It’s a dangerous situation in many cases.”

According to a survey conducted by the American Psychological Association and the American Federation of Teachers between July 2020 and June 2021 with nearly 15,000 respondents, 33% of teachers reported verbal or threatening victimization where the student was the aggressor. Another 14% of teachers reported physical violence on the part of students toward teachers.

Grady, a teacher at Leon Elementary School in Mason County, said the rise of these incidents is often tied to the learning disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. But she believes these problems are here to stay due to exacerbated mental health issues, systemic poverty, and children raised by either grandparents or foster families.

“I think that this is the new wave of how kids behave because of mental health problems, number one, but also that coupled with the breakdown of the family structure, meaning that there’s not a lot of responsibilities at home, or not a lot of expectations,” Grady said. “A lot of kids are living on their tablets and just living through social media and YouTube, and parents just not being parents and having the expectations that we used to see.”

Grady said she was not prepared to release specifics of any potential legislation, but she is talking with her fellow lawmakers, the Board of Education, the Department of Education, fellow teachers, and administrators. But a potential bill would focus on Kindergarten through fifth grade.

“What I want is us all to work on something together so we have…something that is strong enough that everybody feels like it accomplishes something and everybody can support it,” Grady said.

“I think a common goal is that we need to make sure we’re giving everybody the education that they deserve and the education that we are required to give them,” Grady continued. “That is impossible to do in some classrooms when you have a teacher who has to focus all their effort and all their energy on one or two students who are acting out or using these behaviors that are threatening and disrupting or impeding on the learning of others.”

During the 2023 legislative session, lawmakers passed House Bill 2890, modifying student discipline. The bill allows teachers in grades six through 12 to exclude students from the classroom who are disorderly, interfering in the educational process, or obstructing a teacher from their classrooms for the remainder of the school day.

The school principal must be informed by the teacher within 24 hours of the disciplinary action, with the teacher required to submit an electronic record of the incident within 24 hours. Students removed from the classroom are placed under the control of the school principal. Those students can only be readmitted to the classroom if the principal provides written certification to the teacher, including the type of discipline administered.

If a student has been removed twice from a classroom in one semester, the student can only be readmitted to the classroom once a conference has occurred with the student’s parents or guardians. After the third removal, the student could be transferred to another setting, such as an alternative learning center. After three removals within a month, the student is required to receive either an in-school or out-of-school suspension.

HB 2890, which went into effect on June 9, has caused headaches for officials with the state Department of Education, which is working on training and policies to reduce school discipline disparities that disproportionately affect minority students, students living in poverty and foster children. Officials believe the new law is overly broad and provides no definitions.

“This gives every decision ability to the teacher regardless of what is in policy or in (State) Code,” said Drew McClanahan, director of leadership development and support at the Department of Education, during a September meeting of the state Board of Education. “The code is written ‘as determined by the teacher.’ There is no definition for what disruptive or disrespectful conduct pursuant to this particular bill is.”

“It may be well-intended, but you’re not hitting what you’re shooting at,” said state Board of Education President Paul Hardesty.

Grady, speaking Tuesday, said she supported HB 2890 but agreed that the law needs to be re-looked and tweaked to address the concerns of state education officials and school administrators.

“It did kind of leave it open to a teacher’s discretion. I think we’ve talked a little bit more about how different teachers have different classroom management styles and different teachers might view a disruption as one thing or another,” Grady said. “It’s something we are looking at; we’re looking at tweaking it a little bit.”

The Department of Education worked with administrators over the summer through conferences for training, including data reporting practices and root cause analysis of student behavioral problems, best practices for classroom management, student engagement and instructional quality. The department has worked with the Behavior/Mental Health Technical Assistance Center at Marshall University on expanded training. Regional training events are also underway.

Department officials hope to have a policy on student discipline for the state board to approve in April. The department is also getting set to launch a student discipline data dashboard to provide educators and the public a window into how students are being disciplined in public schools. The dashboard will allow the public to search by type of discipline, rates of suspensions, and demographic groups.

According to a department report released in May looking at the previous 2022-2023 school year, there were 169,963 total discipline incidents with 51,432 students referred for discipline. Nearly one in every 10 students faced suspension last year, representing more than 177,777 of instructional days lost, with an average of 6.19 days lost per student suspended.