Violence in schools has surged, officials contribute it to Covid-19 pandemic

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This school year, reports have shown that violence has gone up in schools from students with the reason being kids staying home for the past year and a half due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Dr. Rebecca Good has worked in education for more than 3 decades, serving as a teacher, administrator, and supervisor. She appeared on “Live and Local” with Jordan Miller on 1480 WHBC on Wednesday and she says that educators were not expecting this from students coming into this year.

“We really thought that this third year (of dealing with the Coronavirus pandemic) we would be coming back to normal, Dr. Good said. “Unfortunately, what we weren’t prepared for was handling a large amount of kids who were home for a year and a half and missed a year and a half of socialization. Especially in middle school. That’s a critical time for kids to learn social skills and they were home. Now, we’re seeing the outcome of that.”

Dr. Good states that not only has there been violence brewing from students but from parents as well as they have showcased that type of behavior at school board meetings and conversations with educators. She encourages parents to do the following when it comes to overreaction in the classroom. 

“One thing is to communicate with your kids about what’s happening out there. What they are seeing and what’s happening at school,” says Good. “Also, making sure parents practice gratitude and empathy and helping their kids practice that same thing. Gratitude about what is going right, what we do have, how we are blessed, and maybe taking our kids and going to food banks so they can feel that they are helping in the community and that is HUGE in growing our kids up to be productive citizens in society.”

Teachers now more than ever across the country are feeling burned out. Dr. Good explains why that is. 

“The violence in schools is the perfect storm of teacher vacancies coming because it was bad before COVID,” she said. “Now we have teachers walking out mid-year in numbers we have never seen before because of the burnout, because of the conditions and they unfortunately don’t feel valued. They don’t get a lot of money for the work that they do and it’s bubbling up.”

Dr. Good details that there is a ton of anger amongst teachers and calls for parents and students to stop this behavior . 

“We’ve had face masks ripped off of teachers’ faces. There’s just all this anger and frankly we need to stop and breathe and showcase that this is not right. We need to move in a more positive direction because we are really really hurting our kids. Not only are we hurting ourselves and our souls but we’re hurting our kids by role modeling this negative energy.”

Dr. Good hosts a weekly podcast called “Ask Dr. B Good” and she says how parents can practice going towards that positive direction with activities of gratitude. 

“I have had a couple weeks of gratitude activities on my show that adults can do and of course, model for their children as well so that we can get to looking at our blessings instead of what’s going on everywhere. We really have to get back in that mode so we can, as a society, move forward without this violence. So, as parents, learn gratitude, make our teachers feel valued or else we are going to have a hot mess going into next school year.”