Teachers want more crisis control training

‘She was screaming at the top of her lungs, ‘Why is everyone staring at me?’ ” recalled Costello, 32, a second-grade teacher at the John Winthrop Elementary School in Dorchester.

It was the most unnerving encounter Costello had faced in seven years of teaching, but at least she had help. Her school has a crisis team — a group of five faculty members, equipped with walkie-talkies, who are trained to defuse crisis situations and, if necessary, use physical restraints. She alerted the team, but said she hasn’t had the same backup for emergencies at other Massachusetts schools.

Around the state, teachers say they’re often poorly equipped to handle the increasingly complex problems children bring to school every day. Tighter budgets have led to larger class sizes and cuts in counseling as well as other support services.

Several cases that grabbed headlines earlier this year underscore the issue. In April, an outburst by a 7-year-old boy with special needs, who was mistakenly placed in the wrong Fall River elementary school, spun so out of control that police used handcuffs to subdue him. Just a few weeks earlier, Florida police shackled a 5-year-old Florida kindergartner after she attacked a teacher and an assistant principal. Upset parents complained ‘Ask, ‘What is the policy for children acting out in the building? What do you do the first time, the second time? And how often are the parents contacted [when there is a problem]?’ ” DelSignore said.

At least twice a year, Worcester offers all public school teachers crisis prevention training, said Maria Santos, a school counselor who teaches the two-day course.

Teachers learn, for instance, how to safely disentangle themselves from a student who has grabbed their hair or arm, or locked their teeth around a body part. They spend the entire first day practicing skills to defuse a situation before it turns physical.

”When people are agitated, 78 percent of what you say they don’t hear,” Santos said. ”They focus on your facial expressions, your body language, and your personal space.”

So teachers are taught to stand off to the side of an agitated child, rather than squarely in front, to appear less threatening and challenging, Santos said.

But a key problem, say education veterans, is that too many new teachers lack basic classroom management skills.

”Coming out of college, I don’t think most teachers are trained well to deal with student discipline,” said Ed Doherty, former president of the Boston Teachers Union, and now assistant to the president of the Massachusetts Federation of Teachers, the state’s second-largest teachers’ union.

”The state requires every new teacher to have a minimum of one year of mentoring with a veteran teacher. That’s not even happening because districts have run out of money,” Doherty said.

Bill Kaylor, president of the Fall River Educators’ Association, said a teacher shortage, especially in math and science fields, has created a ”catch-22″ situation.

He said his school system is increasingly relying on mid-career professionals, such as engineers who get a provisional teaching license and then head into the classroom with lots of technical knowledge but little practical experience on how to handle children.

”We hired 11 new math teachers last September and we released seven of them in the first 90 days, because they were not competent,” Kaylor said. ”It all came down to classroom management.”

But even if teachers receive that training, parents say, they often are overwhelmed by the sheer numbers.

“My kids have been in classrooms where there were too many kids out of control, and there’s nobody, besides the principal or the secretary, to have the ability to have a time-out in assisting the teacher,” said Peggy Wiesenberg, a member of the Boston Citywide Parents Council.

When it comes to behavior issues, it’s a two-way street, said Vincenza Sullivan, an active PTO member and a Saugus mother of three children.

”A lot of times, when there is a discipline problem and it throws the entire class off, there is no support from the parents,” Sullivan said. ”A lot of parents are in denial or they’re too busy.”

Still, Richard Robison, executive director of the Boston-based Federation for Children with Special Needs, said he is hearing an earful from parents about how teachers lack expertise in handling behavior conflicts.

“It’s the big issue of special education these days,” Robison said. “That’s what causes people to come looking for help from us, and their kids are younger and younger. Kids from preschool are being removed from class.”

Costello, the teacher from Dorchester’s John Winthrop school, gives her school administrators high marks for providing regular staff training and a crisis team to handle tough cases.

“Every school needs this,” she said. “If you have a student known for hitting or swearing, if you see their anger is going to escalate, you need to know how to stop it right there.”