It’s been called “America’s most violent high school” by the New York Post.
Fights are a daily occurrence, as are classroom disruptions from unruly students. And earlier this week, a teacher got hurt breaking up a fight between students.
Simply put: Brockton High School has a violence problem.
A bad one.
And thanks to political correctness, liberals are in no position to solve it.
There are two easy solutions here, but our liberal state won’t allow them. Take the problematic kids out of the school and let the overwhelming majority of kids who are trying to do the right thing go to school and not fear for their safety or have their education disrupted by poorly behaving students. Also, put people in the schools who can restore order when violence gets out of hand.
Unfortunately, Massachusetts, being one of the most liberal-leaning states in the country, rejects these easy solutions to a bad problem.
Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey’s administration rejected the Brockton City Council’s request to put National Guard troops in the schools.
“I don’t think the National Guard is appropriate,” Healey told reporters on February 27, 2024. “I do understand though the concerns raised by the school committee and others in the community.”
That’s right: the people closest to the problem came up with a solution they hoped would quell the problem and the white liberal who lives in Arlington (median household income $136,312 per year) said no.
To make matters worse, Healey didn’t articulate her opposition. She merely said it’s not appropriate — as if she knows the appropriate course of action for Brockton Public Schools better than the people who actually live in the community and who have thought hard about this issue.
The other problem is the changes made to Chapter 222 of the Massachusetts General Laws. The chapter was amended in November 2022 to severely limit schools’ abilities to suspend and expel students. Before those options come into play, they must exhaust all “alternative remedies” — and they must keep the students in the building.
Some of those remedies include mediation, conflict resolution, restorative justice, and collaborative problem-solving.
These methods can sometimes be helpful when people break rules, especially if people with otherwise clean records make a mistake or two. However, when it’s the same people causing the same problems over and over again, schools need a way to take immediate action to keep everyone else safe.
So what does the Healey administration support doing to get rid of this violence problem?
It lacks serious solutions, based on what a spokesman for the Executive Office of Education told NewBostonPost in an email message last week.
Effectively, the Office said that Brockton is doing safety audits, which is the equivalent of a “we’re monitoring the situation” as the problem persists and nothing changes.
Here are the points the Office included in the email:
Massachusetts’ Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) has been in communication with the Superintendent of Brockton Public Schools to understand any requests for state support from the school district.
Following the discovery of a deficit in the Brockton Public Schools budget at the beginning of the ’23-’24 school year, DESE began providing additional support to assist the district with its fiscal management. This included signing an MOU with DESE.
As part of that support, Brockton Public Schools and DESE agreed that the Department will support a Safety Audit at the District, including funding the audit and providing technical assistance for implementing improvement findings that emerge because of the audit.
Typically, safety audits assess safety protocols at schools, elevate any barriers to achieving a safe environment and make recommendations to ensure safe learning environments for all students.
A similar audit was done for Boston Public Schools via the Systemic Improvement Plan (SIP).
Safety audits will identify safety and security interventions that are working in order to highlight and expand best practices. For example, the audit could highlight the positive use of bullying intervention specialists at schools in the district or other effective programming of that sort.
Safety audits will also identify areas of concern and recommend changes for improvement. That could include recommendations to improve hiring processes for security and safety positions in the district, creating an anonymous reporting system for increased awareness of anticipated dangerous behaviors, and prioritizing roles and responsibilities in all department units to ensure that personnel focus on school-based safety and policing practices, not duties customarily associated with municipal or county policing functions.
Notice how none of that says anything about protecting students and staff from violence and classroom disruption. Nothing about getting those kids out of the schools or deterring them from committing violence daily.
Liberals and those on the political left may argue that taking real action will just push the violence out of the schools and into the real world. Well, then it becomes a legal issue — and these violent anti-social people don’t belong in our society. If they’re going to go around hurting people, they belong behind bars. Maybe some people don’t want to hear that, but it’s the truth.
People who treat others poorly and subject them to violence make the world a worse place and deserve to be locked up and excluded from our society. We haven’t found a way to make society without doing that to some people, so let’s stop pretending we will.
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