You have probably heard about the incident that transpired in South Carolina last week. A high school sophomore (an African American girl) was using her phone during an Algebra 1 class. The teacher (a white man) asked the student to put away her phone and the student refused or didn’t comply. Sometime thereafter, the teacher called for an administrator (an African American man), who asked the student to leave the classroom. When she didn’t comply with that request, the administrator called the school resource officer (a white man) who tipped her chair, threw her to the ground, and dragged her to the front of the classroom before handcuffing her and arresting her for disrupting class.

In response, the school resource officer has been fired and the superintendent has articulated the need to learn from this incident so that nothing similar happens again. The Justice Department has initiated an investigation.

The video of this incident inspires, in me at least, questions that are relevant to our work here. There has been a lot of coverage about the SRO, his actions, and the concept of police presence in schools, but I want to focus on the students and the teacher for a moment. I want to say here that there are some complex dynamics of race and school in this situation and we don’t know all of the facts—we only saw a 15-second video that shows us nothing of what happened before. I offer these thoughts to help us all make sense of what has been exposed in the media and learn from it.

If we focus on the student, we might ask ourselves these questions:

Why did the 16-year-old sophomore not put away her phone? What was underneath that response? We know now that there were some circumstances happening in the girl’s life that may have affected this interaction—she was recently placed in foster care. Did anyone of the three adults in this situation know about those circumstances? This same dynamic between the teacher and student plays out, albeit often less egregiously, in classrooms across the US every day. How can we balance the need for efficient conducting of classroom activities with the patient, curious, empathetic responses to students that help us understand how they’re set up for learning each day? And what else might be underneath a pattern of teachers seeing African American students as “defiant?” Could it be fear, on one side or both? Could it be black students’ resistance to the assimilative culture of schools? Could it be a student seizing a moment of feeling powerful in a life of scant feelings of power? I assert that students don’t usually “defy” or not follow instructions because they think it’s fun—there are reasons underneath. It’s important that we are a school and a community that take great interest in and concern for those reasons.

If we focus on the teacher and the administrator, we ask ourselves these questions:

Why did the teacher choose to handle the situation as he did? Did he use any other strategies? Did he go kneel down next to her and quietly inquire about what was going on with her? Did he get students started on a learning activity and then go talk with the student individually? Did he employ humor, love, and asset-affirmation when asking the student to put away her phone?

To what extent were the teacher and the administrator outraged at the student’s defiance? To what extent did either of them feel afraid of losing face and power when the student refused to follow their directions? Is it possible that fear and outrage, individually or together, closed off their cognitive acuity to think about responding to the student from a place of love, respect, empathy, and curiosity?

The teacher set off a series of escalating events. In a moment of exasperation, fear, or outrage, the teacher reached for the power that he could access. In this case, and in many situations in our district and sometimes in our school, the teacher reached for power by asking for another adult to come take charge or by sending the student out of the classroom. When the administrator arrived in the classroom at Spring Valley High School, he too may have experienced the fear of humiliation in front of the classroom of students when the student in question refused to leave the room or outrage that the student refused to follow instructions. He also reached for the power he could easily access—the school resource officer. The school resource officer reached for his power—-force.

What kind of professional development and school culture will help all of us experience moments like this not as threatening, as sometimes happens, but as opportunities to take a curious and calm look into our toolboxes of strategies rather than choosing escalation or power struggle? What will it take for us to know all of our students personally so that interactions, even when difficult, are undergirded by trust?

When we focus on the other students:

It is striking in this video to see students in the classroom calmly watching the violent incident unfold. What was going on for them? To what extent have the adults created a sense of community at Spring Valley High School such that students might have stepped in to help in the interaction between the teacher and student, between the student and administrator, or between the student and the SRO? It makes me think about the school culture we have here. How would our students react if they witnessed this incident? How would we want them to react? How would we, as the adults, want to react when other students step in to help de-escalate a situation? I plan to engage in a conversation with our students about this issue to think together about the community we’re trying to create. I invite everyone into those conversations with students.

And then there was Niya, the other girl who was arrested in this situation because she was upset, shouting, and cursing at the SRO during this incident—she was doing what she could in that moment to step in and try to stop the incident. According to interviews with her, she didn’t actually know the girl who had her cell phone out—but she was compelled to stand up for the girl because of her convictions about fair treatment, regardless of existing relationships. This also speaks to the cultivation of community to build the expectation that students take care of each other.

————————————————————————————————————————-

I raise this with us because these issues are relevant here. I want us to be thinking about the root causes of defiance, about our reactions when students are defiant and what’s underneath our reactions, and how we’re building community, every day, between ourselves and our students and between and among students.

We are a community that has the strength to ask, engage, and answer these kinds of questions. I am proud to work here with you because we value hard questions. Please let me know if any of these questions piqued your curiosity or interest and you want to talk further. It would make my day.

Related Data

– “Witnesses to Monday’s incident said that in an Algebra 1 class, the girl, a sophomore, was on her phone, and the teacher told her to put it away. The teacher summoned an administrator, who brought in the deputy. The adults repeatedly asked the student to get up and leave the class, but she refused. When the altercation occurred, students stood up, confused about what was happening, but the deputy told them, “Sit down, or you all will be next,” said one student, Charles Scarborough, 16. Adding to the surprise and confusion, several students said the girl was usually quiet and not a troublemaker. The deputy also detained a second student, Niya Kenny, 18, who told a local television station that her only offense was objecting to his treatment of the other girl.” Fausset, R., Pérez-Peña, R., & Blinder, A. (2015, October 27). Race and Discipline in Spotlight After South Carolina Officer Drags Student. New York Times.

– “The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, along with the F.B.I. and the United States attorney for South Carolina, said Tuesday that it would look into the incident.” Fausset, R., Pérez-Peña, R., & Blinder, A. (2015, October 27). Race and Discipline in Spotlight After South Carolina Officer Drags Student. New York Times.

– “A South Carolina sheriff’s deputy has been fired after videos were posted online Monday showing him violently throwing a high school student from her desk in a classroom.” Cleary, T. (2015, October 28). Heavy.com – Breaking News, Sports, Entertainment, TV, Tech, Gaming & Health. Retrieved October 29, 2015, from http://heavy.com/tag/5-fast-facts/

– “The Spring Valley High teenager who was violently taken down by a sheriff’s deputy in a class in Columbia, S.C., Monday is under foster care, but according to most recent reports is not an orphan.” DeBerry, J. (2015, October 29). Spring Valley High student’s attorney corrects report that she’s an orphan: Jarvis DeBerry. The Times-Picayune, Greater New Orleans.