Editor’s note: This story was produced by students in the University of Notre Dame’s Gallivan Program in Journalism, Ethics, and Democracy. The students spent about three months gathering data, interviewing dozens of sources and writing and editing stories under the guidance of a former Star reporter now teaching at Notre Dame.
On the first day of school in August 2023, Jayne Watkin watched as one of her new students came off the bus and double-hand choked three of his peers — an example of the violent behavior that would later extend to her classroom.
Originally employed by Porter County Education Services (PCES) in Valparaiso, Watkin was an elementary applied skills teacher who moved into a different position through Porter Township before leaving the school system in 2024.
She enjoyed her job, but said it eventually became unmanageable when her concerns about this student’s aggressive behavior went ignored.
Watkin recalled colleagues laughing at the situation and brushing her off, thinking that the kindergarten student was actually a third grader due to his size. They said he would only be in Watkin’s class for one year. But Watkin worked with students in kindergarten through third grade, and the prospect of another three years of this student’s aggression toward herself and other students was too much.
“I just got tired of the scratching and the biting and all of the kicking; hair pulling was another big one for him,” said Watkin. “I was told I was the teacher, and I should just figure it out. I said there’s not enough hours in the day for me to figure this out, because I have this one student who is aggressive unless he gets his way 100 percent of the time … And then I have these other 13 individuals that I’m responsible for.
“I had relationships with parents that were phenomenal and I really hated to give those up, but for my own mental well-being as well as my physical well-being, I had to get out of there.”
PCES Principal Jen Rogers did not returned repeated email and phone requests for an interview.
Harmful behaviors are not an uncommon occurrence in Indiana schools. Watkin is just one out of the thousands of Hoosier educators who have suffered injuries due to student violence.
The 2023-24 Indiana School Employee Injury Data Report outlines 3,032 unique incidents of violence aimed at teachers. The injuries range from bumps and bruises to broken bones. Porter County Education Services, which serves about 5,000 special education students across seven school districts and 55 schools, led the state in days missed by teachers due to injury, accounting for 30 full or partial days, and also ranked among the top five school districts in Indiana for total reported injuries.
However, the majority of districts, like Porter Township where Watkin now works, did not report any injuries despite the requirements outlined in House Enrolled Act 1591. Only 127 of Indiana’s 351 public school districts — or 36% — submitted mandatory injury data for the statewide report.
Courtney Crown, senior media specialist at the Indiana Department of Education (IDOE), explained there are no penalties in place for school districts that fail to report employee injury data.
“While Indiana Code does require all public schools, including charter schools, to report physical injuries to IDOE, it does not provide the department with statutory enforcement authority to ensure reporting compliance,” Crown wrote in an email.
A three-month investigation by students in the University of Notre Dame Gallivan Program in Journalism, Ethics, and Democracy found teachers in Indiana are most often hurt due to a lack of training, staffing shortages, or both. When only about a third of school districts comply with the law and report their data, the problem of violence against teachers is undercounted and therefore underappreciated.
The problem is not limited to Indiana.
Nationally, teachers have been both threatened with injury and physically attacked by students at an alarming rate. The most recent report from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) found that 4.1% of teachers were physically attacked by students during the 2020-21 academic year. The National Education Association estimates the number of K-12 teachers working in 2020-21 was more than 3.2 million.
These statistics indicate that approximately 131,700 teachers were injured across the United States in a single year. Another study for the American Psychological Association (APA) suggests the NCES numbers may understate the problem.
Survey data collected by the APA’s Task Force on Violence against Educators and School Personnel suggested many teachers had considered leaving the profession due to violence. The APA study found that violence against teachers had doubled in the decade before the pandemic, then lessened when schools did not meet in person, before returning to levels “equal to or exceeding” those before the shutdown.
Prior to the pandemic, 42% of teachers reported instances of physical violence from students. That number increased to 56% after pandemic restrictions ended.
“When teachers get hit, we feel like we can’t do our job,” said Diane Nusbaum, a former special education teacher and current professor of education at Saint Mary’s College. “It’s a horrible feeling because we’re nurturers. We have hearts that want to educate students, and when our heart can’t do that because of all these obstacles, everything’s getting tougher and we burn out.”
How an injury drove a teacher away from her profession
Hannah Elliot, a former special education teacher in the Elwood Community School Corporation northeast of Indianapolis, lost 85% of her hearing following a student-caused injury at school.
As a first-year teacher, Elliot accepted a special education position in Elwood that offered flexibility under its new program director. There weren’t any immediate red flags in the months leading up to the start of school, but on the first day fellow teachers told her about one student’s severe behavioral issues.
This student’s outbursts had been an ongoing issue for three years, and Elliot quickly realized that few teachers had received the necessary restraint training to handle this student. The result was a dangerous environment for herself and others.
Elliott said she requested restraint training from her school several times, but her requests were dismissed and not taken seriously.
“There was one teacher in the building who had the restraint training, and I kept asking for it, because with a child like that, you know you need to be able to legally restrain him,” Elliot said. “And they kept saying, ‘Oh yeah, we’ll get to it. We’ll get to it.’ Well, they never did.”
During a meltdown two weeks into the school year, Elliot was helping to put the student in a consequence room when he ripped off a metal door handle and threw it, striking Elliot’s ear.
The damage to Elliot’s eardrum, as well as her mental health following the incident, required her to step away from the teaching profession, something she had never considered after dedicating five years to obtaining her degree.
“I worked really hard to get there, but I just got to the point where I was like, ‘You know what? I cannot see myself walking into another school,’” said Elliot. “The trust had just been so broken.”
Elliot’s injury was one impetus for the new law tracking teacher injuries. In Indiana, teacher injury data is collected through Data Exchange, the standard data submission mechanism for schools. Crown, the IDOE media specialist, said the department provides reminders to complete submissions in the weeks leading up to the deadline.
While there is only one year of data available, Crown said the IDOE plans to take current and future data on teacher injuries into consideration when crafting training content.
In Indiana, teacher attack data collection effort faces hurdles
The recurring cycle of teacher injuries is exacerbated by a lack of resources, training, and the intense responsibilities placed on educators to resolve external traumas.
Indiana State Rep. Ed Clere,, R-New Albany, said he authored the language on teacher injuries in House Enrolled Act 1591 with the intention to gather data on teacher injuries to inform policy making and to rebuild trust between teachers, administrators, and the state.
Clere’s involvement with the legislation came after the Indiana State Teachers Association brought it to him around the same time his wife was injured while teaching at Clarksville High School.
“She (Amy) was kicked while breaking up a fight and had to go to urgent care,” said Clere. “Thankfully, she didn’t have any long-term effects.”
Since the bill’s implementation, there has been pushback from other representatives to repeal its reporting requirement.
Clere expressed his disappointment in having to fight for the existing requirement rather than improving compliance rates, but remains hopeful that legislators will have difficult conversations about the reasons behind teacher injuries. He said incomplete data still has value, and he made the case for strengthening the existing requirement.
“I would like to think there will be an opportunity for stakeholders to come together and acknowledge the need for the data,” he said. “Ultimately, the need to act in response to the data to address staffing and other issues could help create a safer work environment for all school employees, from the boss to the classroom to the cafeteria.”
Experts call for enhanced crisis intervention training in schools
Student-on-teacher violence significantly impacts teacher retention rates, experts say, and there is a constantly revolving door of educators coming in and out of the classroom as a result of insufficient training.
Nusbaum, the Saint Mary’s College education professor, said Crisis Prevention Institute (CPI) training, along with crisis teams in schools, would help maintain the dignity of students and the safety of the teachers.
Jeanette Dalton, who taught emotionally-disabled students at PCES for 35 years, echoed Nusbaum’s sentiment. She credits the CPI training she received as a result of her graduate certificate in Emotional and Behavioral Disorders at Ball State University for why she lasted as long as she did in the profession.
“They train you how to put your hands on a child when they are being violent, hurting themselves or others, and if I was not able to put my hands on a child to stop them, then I don’t think I would’ve lasted as long,” said Dalton. “I mean, you do all your training, you don’t wanna put your hands on kids, but if you have to, then I was protected because I was trained.”
Nusbaum believes this training must be extended to paraeducators, the teacher aides who provide assistance and support in the classroom, or else their inability to properly respond to violence may contribute to teacher injuries.
“They aren’t trained in what an emotional disability is, how to do it,” Nusbaum said. “So first of all, let’s pay them better. Second, let’s train them better. Third, most of the time they don’t get CPI training because the district doesn’t want to pay for it. So they’re not even trained to physically protect themselves and aren’t allowed to touch a student without legally being liable.”
Three decades later, similar issues persist
In 1990, Patti Schwetz Casella began her career as a K-6 teacher for emotionally handicapped students at the interlocal in Hebron. Her classroom was self-contained, with children whose ages ranged from 5-13.
Casella said the classroom model led to high stress levels. She had to navigate creating a curriculum and environment that suited each child’s needs, while only having one paraeducator as support staff.
“I had kids swearing and little kindergartners terrified of people, but they didn’t have the resources to divide my room into two different grade levels,” said Casella.
Nearly 30 years later, Tavinder Bains became an emergency hire at PCES’ Special Education Learning Facility (SELF) school during a staff shortage in 2022. Like Casella, Bains was placed in a classroom of students with behavioral issues in grades 1-8.
At the start of her term, Bains had the opportunity to train with her paraeducator and determine what worked best for the classroom. But a medical emergency later left Bains with a new paraeducator who was a special-needs adult himself.
“The burnout for me increased around that time where I was like, not only am I working with my kiddos and having to cater to each one of their needs while still trying to adapt their behaviors, but I also have a paraprofessional who was not equipped at that time for that role,” said Bains.
The type of training teachers and paraeducators receive is critical. At SELF, Bains said training often involved PowerPoint presentations given by other teachers and staff, rather than psychologists or behavioral interventionists who specialize in special education.
This gap between what teachers need and what the administrators are providing can partly be attributed to the distance between the latter and what goes on in their building’s classrooms day-to-day.
“I had one administrator come in to teach for two days in my classroom, and I was told she took a couple of breaks because it was very hard for her to teach,” said Bains. “But suddenly, I was able to get all the resources that I asked for at the beginning of school. I think a lot of that is detachment. The teacher faces those problems head-on, every single day, where administrators might have to deal with it once in a blue moon.”
Melanie Wright, a sixth-grade teacher at Anderson Intermediate School and former state representative for District 35, is an outspoken advocate for Indiana’s children and teachers. Wright said adequate training, support, and resources for paraeducators and teachers is dependent upon the district’s administration as well as the surrounding community.
Wright said negative attitudes toward teachers frequently result in them being scapegoated in situations where they are the victims of violence. A lack of support from both administrative and parental fronts has led some teachers to collect their own evidence to validate their experiences.
“One of my friends taught middle school and life skills and had an aggressive student,” said Wright. “She thought that that aggressive student would be removed because she had seen that student break a teacher’s finger, and she thought that he would find an appropriate placement, but she ended up getting him a few years later. He had lots of kicking issues, and she kept documenting. And finally she videotaped him pulling her over the table. And then finally, a removal happened.”
Effort to put cameras in classrooms fails in Indiana legislature
Indiana State Rep. Becky Cash, R-Zionsvill, authored House Bill 1285, which originally included a provision requiring the installation of cameras in special education classrooms.
While the bill passed this year’s legislative session, language regarding cameras was removed. Cash remains hopeful that the provision will be implemented later because cameras could both exonerate teachers who have been falsely accused of neglect and provide evidence against those teachers who do not follow state protocols.
Cash said that she is concerned with how restraints and seclusions are being administered in special needs classrooms, but she also acknowledges that parents have accused teachers of improperly using restraint and seclusion practices in the past.
“They’re (teachers) being blamed for things that are happening and they don’t have any way to defend themselves without the videos,” said Cash.
As a parent, Cash wishes that the dialogue between state legislators and educators was more open. She believes that classroom cameras would ease tensions between teachers and parents over the administration of restraint and seclusion.
Andrea Christensen, director of Education, Schooling, and Society (ESS) at the University of Notre Dame, stresses the importance of open dialogue and communal support for teachers.
A school community that rallies around both its students and teachers leads to better teacher retention and an environment in which children feel supported and cared for. This type of success, she said, ultimately begins with a principal who listens to their teachers and enacts change on their behalf.
“There has to be a community among the teachers, but the principal is the person that facilitates that and establishes that, so that teachers feel like they are each other’s support system,” said Christensen.
Keith Gambill, president of the Indiana State Teachers Association, wants to go beyond the numbers of teacher injuries to investigate the motivation behind student-on-teacher violence.
“I think it’s not enough to just say we have these violent outcomes within a classroom, without trying to figure out why this is happening,” Gambill said. “I think that’s the part that sadly gets missed. What is the root cause of these problems?”
Full classrooms exacerbate strain of behavioral issues
The caseload — or total number of students assigned to a teacher, speech-language pathologist, or a related services provider — should ideally sit between 13 and 17 students to enhance learning efficacy, according to the National Education Policy Center. But educators across Indiana say that is far from their reality.
Sarah Nagle, a former social worker at Eastern Hancock Elementary School in Charlottesville, said she was responsible for more than 530 students at her previous school. She said a lack of school support staff impacted her well-being and that of her colleagues.
“You’re putting one person with 25 students all day long; that’s almost impossible to not have issues arise,” she said. “And you know, if I’m being pulled to one classroom, then another situation happens in another one, that teacher is kind of out of luck until I get the opportunity to go.”
Nagle was assisting a teacher when her nose was broken by a student in August 2023.
The student in question kicked Nagle in the face after throwing shoes at her, causing damage to her nasal cartilage and requiring her to undergo reconstructive surgery for a deviated septum.
Nagle recalls several of her coworkers stating that she looked as though she had been in a car accident. The swelling was so severe that she could not have the necessary surgeries until the following February.
Nagle’s injury and recovery was covered under workman’s compensation, but according to Indiana state law, teachers must use seven days of paid time off before workman’s compensation will go into effect. With only 12 days of paid time off offered each year, Nagle lost more than half of her days, which was a significant concern due to her son’s epilepsy.
While Nagle said she still loves her job and cannot imagine working in any other profession, the physical and mental exhaustion has led her to realize that she must prioritize her own well-being as well as her family’s.
“I felt like for a while there, I was in a dark place because I felt like I couldn’t do my job anymore,” said Nagle. “I wasn’t good at it. And I know now that’s not the case. And I’ve been hit and kicked since then, but just there for a moment, it was really hard.”
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: ‘I had to get out of there.’ Less than half of Indiana school districts report attacks on teachers
Reporting by Lilyann Gardner and Sarah Cate White / Indianapolis Star
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
