Putnam Seeing Rise In Poor Behavior Among Elementary School Students

Putnam County teachers seeing an increase in unruly behavior, something Director Of Schools Corby King said must be addressed by administrators and parents.

King said students fail to listen, distract classmates, and experience physical outbursts, such as punching or kicking teachers. King said it’s happening more often in the aftermath of the pandemic.

“Our younger students who just didn’t have some of the socialization opportunities through COVID that are now entering our classrooms in pre-k, kindergarten, first grade, we are seeing more significant outbursts in the class, more significant behaviors that are just challenging for a teacher to deal with,” King said.

King said the system has put additional resources into its classroom management training programs to combat the issue. The schools also utilizing behavioral coaches who go to schools directly to handle particularly challenging cases.

“We could see some things like we talked about in the work session, suspension rates rising and things like that, because it is so disruptive when those one or two students are taking away from the learning of the others in the classroom,” King said.

King said that the schools want to work with parents to remedy the issue, but there will likely be a rise in disciplinary action in the meantime.

“Thankfully, it is a small number of students,” King said. “The unfortunate thing is that it only takes one or two students in a classroom to disrupt and it disrupts the learning for everyone.”

The issue is not limited to Putnam County, King said, with directors across the state seeing this trend. During a September work session, the School Board discussed the issue of suspensions and how to best deal with the issues.