School staff, parents: Dixon’s Washington teachers overwhelmed by kindergarteners’ ‘violent’ behavior

DIXON – “Where else can you work and it is just expected that you will be assaulted every day?”

That was the question posed Oct. 16 by Sasha Gomes, a secretary at Dixon’s Washington Elementary School, to the Dixon Public Schools District 170 Board when she – along with other staff, teachers and parents of students – expressed their concerns about what they describe as increasingly violent behavior exhibited by Washington’s kindergarten students.

“Teachers’ rooms are being destroyed, chairs or other objects thrown, tables flipped, bins dumped and items broken, all while trying to teach 20-plus students,” said Maria Peterson, a Washington Elementary kindergarten teacher. “Teachers and teacher assistants are being hit by chairs and other objects. They’re being hit by students, kicked, scratched, spit on, bit and cursed at. The other students in the classroom are unfortunately witnessing it all.

“With no other choice, our administration is constantly being called to help. Many times they’re unavailable because there are numerous situations needing their attention at the same time. After calling for help, if there is anyone available, the students are removed from our room with a lack of resources or options. They’ll return to the classroom after a short period of time ... and the behavior begins again.”

Gomes, who also is a parent of a kindergartener at Washington, said her son’s “classmates have been bitten, hit and pinched.”

“I would have never imagined a preschool through first-grade school would be anything like this. I didn’t expect [my son’s] experience to be so violent,” Gomes said.

Peterson has a daughter who is a kindergartener at Washington as well. She said her daughter began the school year excited to learn, loving her teacher and making friends with other students in her class. But a few weeks later, her daughter became more and more hesitant to go into the classroom.

“It got to the point where she cried every morning,” Peterson said.

She described how she was carrying her daughter to her room one morning when a student came running out of the classroom, and “her little body instantly became tense. She dug her fingers into my back and hid her face in my neck, and cried even harder,” Peterson said.

At that point, Peterson said, she realized that her daughter was not wanting to go into her classroom because of the violence that she was witnessing every day.

“This made me feel like a terrible mom,” Peterson said. “I’d been forcing her to go into a room where she didn’t feel safe.”

Board policy prevents school board members from immediately responding to any public comment at its meetings; as a result, a meeting was called for Wednesday, Oct. 23, with the goal of coming up with some possible solutions.

Board members size up classroom behaviors

In anticipation of the meeting, several board members visited Washington to see firsthand the issues that are occurring.

“My observation is that the overall mood is exhaustion,” board President Linda Wegner said. “Everyone is pitching in where necessary and working as hard as they can to fill in the gaps temporarily, but it’s not sustainable.”

Board member Melissa Gates visited the school Tuesday, when she spent some individual time with a few of the students exhibiting violent behavior, she said.

“It’s hard to watch,” Gates said. “[The kids] are extremely hard for anybody to maintain for any length of time.”

The majority of the behaviors that Gates said she witnessed appear to be developmental and emotional maturity issues in students who are only 5 years old.

She described walking into the school Tuesday and being taken aback by how young the students were.

“The little ones that we’re talking about are below my knees – most of them,” Gates said. “These are little, tiny children.

“This isn’t a punishment issue. These kids need to learn, and they need to learn that they’re safe at school, and most of them don’t understand that right now.”

Wegner pointed out that the district has various interventions and supports in place at Washington to help manage the students. Some of those include special training for school staff, classroom observation by a school psychologist and social-emotional learning specialists from the Regional Office of Education 47. Six staff members also have been added to the school.

Some students have been moved to half-day kindergarten, while others use the “calm room” in the morning to start their day. Those who do need a calmer environment will have “quiet lunches.”

The school also has a “reset room,” which is a designated area where students, accompanied by the needed staff members, can go to regulate before returning to class after an incident.

Along with those measures, the district uses a functional behavior assessment to gather information about a student’s behaviors through interviews, document reviews, direct observation and data collection. Those results then are used to develop a behavior intervention plan that outlines strategies to decrease inappropriate behaviors and to increase desired behaviors.

Despite those resources, the problem is persisting.

“We’re seeing that kids are making progress,” Superintendent Margo Empen said. “There are definitely benefits to the things that our teachers and administrators are doing in that intervention and support. Is it as much as we hope? Absolutely not. Is it as fast as we hope? Absolutely not. But change is happening, and certain things are working for certain kids.”

Gates emphasized that having students with behavioral issues in a kindergarten classroom is normal.

“It’s normal all over our region. It’s normal all over our state. It’s normal all over our nation, and it always has been,” Gates said.

However, the reason why it’s “so incredibly difficult” to handle the behaviors is because “we have a significantly high population of these little babies right now,” she said.

“I think it could be a trend,” said Empen, who added that several other school districts are experiencing similar issues.

“This isn’t going to get better for awhile,” Gates said. “We have a lot of little ones, whether it was the pandemic or trauma in their lives. Whatever the reason is, we need to get ready for this.”

What’s next?

One possible solution that the board agreed upon was having a coach from the Illinois Infant/Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation assigned to the school.

“I think that could be set up within a month,” Empen said.

In that program, a behavior specialist typically will come in during the first month of school “and do the evaluations and so on. I think that is something worth pursuing,” Wegner said.

Gates said they also should consider having those coaches or specialists come in the year before so the school’s staff can be prepared for the following year because “a lot of this they knew already.”

A lot of the students who are exhibiting behavioral problems already were having similar issues during preschool, Gates said.

“We should have gotten ready for this,” she said. “Some of this could have been predicted, and I’m not sure how we missed that, or if there was the feeling that ‘Let’s give them a chance. Maybe they’ll mature over the summer and they’ll be ready’ ... but we knew some of these kids were kind of heavy-hitters.”

As a long-term solution, the district is looking into the possibility of implementing junior kindergarten, which would be a two-year program with half-days focused on play-based learning in the first year. The second year, students would progress to full days with full academic expectations.

Empen said there is a little more refining to do on the program before the district is able to implement it at Washington. In talking with other school districts, Empen said all of the junior kindergartens that she’s looked into so far are special education-based.

At Washington, the students exhibiting behavioral problems are diverse. Some of them attended preschool, some didn’t. Some of them had an individualized education program, which is a learning plan created for students with disabilities, but some don’t.

“Every single child is unique, and each one progresses developmentally at their own rate,” Empen said.

Empen’s major focus is figuring out what assessments and/or quantifiers identify what learning plans or programs would be effective for a specific student.

In developing the junior kindergarten program, “we may be looking at two separate types of programs,” she said.

One program could be for students who belong in general education but may need more time to catch up, developmentally and emotionally, to their peers. Another version of the program could be for students with IEPs and would offer them special education services.

Once the program is finalized, the biggest roadblock, especially if two programs were to be implemented, would be making sure the school has enough staff to run it. However, the district will hire additional staff if it’s needed, Empen said.

“We want to develop something that lasts,” Wegner said.

“But we are going to push to do it quickly,” Gates said. “It’s imperative that we do it quickly for everybody involved.”

“There will be some disruption with [implementing a program], inevitably, but we will communicate what the changes are and the why,” Empen said. “It will be what’s in the best interest of our kids and their education.”