Category Archives: NZ Media

…teacher’s actions outside school affected his ability to teach.

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This is unbelievable:

But the board’s investigation of the allegations found no evidence the teacher’s actions outside school affected his ability to teach.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/4739970a11.html

Spurned dad on assault charges

By LEIGH Van Der STOEP – Sunday Star Times | Sunday, 26 October 2008

A father has been charged with assaulting one of his son’s primary school teachers after the teacher had an affair with his wife.

He says the Auckland school failed to act after the affair, which started when the pupil’s mother began work there as a teacher aide.

He has been battling for almost two years to keep the teacher away from his eight-year-old son, but the school allowed the teacher to take some of the boy’s lessons.

Police say the woman’s 42-year-old husband went to the school earlier this year to retrieve his son’s file, but ran into the teacher. He allegedly patted the teacher’s back “forcefully”, causing him to spill his coffee.

“I put my hand on his shoulder and said, ‘Congratulations, you’ve won mate’. I was very sarcastic and patronising,” says the man, who the Sunday Star-Times has chosen not to name to protect the identity of his children.

Despite the minor nature of the allegations and that the man has no previous convictions, he was arrested at work two weeks later and kept in police cells for hours, before being charged with common assault.

The man says his son and two daughters knew the teacher was “partly” responsible for the break-up of their parents and he wanted to protect them from the stress of being in contact with him.

The teacher began the affair with the man’s wife in 2005.

When the man discovered the relationship in 2006 he complained to the principal, who told him there had been other similar allegations against the teacher, the man says.

The principal assured the man he would investigate and the teacher would be kept away from his two children at the school.

“It worked well and he left at the end of the year.

“Then we started getting newsletters last year at the end of third term saying, `We’re encouraging [the teacher] to come back… Why would they encourage someone like that to come back?”

Allegations had since emerged of the teacher asking the man’s wife and another woman for a threesome, drinking at the school’s pool after hours, and being drunk and abusive at the local bar.

“The disturbing thing was [the principal’s] attitude that ‘boys will be boys’, that there was this social scene with teachers. I’m not a teacher and I don’t behave like that.”

When the teacher returned to the school at the start of this year the man complained again to the principal and board of trustees, asking that the teacher be kept away from his son.

The school’s response was that the teacher took only occasional maths, drama and remedial reading lessons.

The boy could read “quietly” in the library during these lessons and did not have to have any contact with the teacher, the school told the father.

Meanwhile, the father had given the teacher a “verbal dressing down” on school grounds, warning him not to come near his family.

“It was strong, it was in his face but I didn’t swear or anything.”

This confrontation prompted the school to warn the man he would be issued with a trespass notice. That was put into force following the alleged assault in the staffroom.

The chairman of the school’s board of trustees said it was a “tricky situation” because it involved high emotion and personal relationships.

But the board’s investigation of the allegations found no evidence the teacher’s actions outside school affected his ability to teach.

The school had dealt with the matter appropriately, but he could not comment on actions taken by the previous board which first investigated, he said. “We took swift action when it needed to be taken…”

The father plans to complain to the Teacher’s Council. The teacher has since left the school.

Concerned teachers seek police help

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Perhaps schools are the wrong place for these children.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10535486&ref=emailfriend

Concerned teachers seek police help

4:00AM Friday Oct 03, 2008
By Martha McKenzie-Minifie
Teachers are asking for more help from police to handle students who act up in class, as they abandon a suggestion to establish “timeout rooms” in high schools for troublemakers.

A new disruptive students paper by the Post Primary Teachers Association’s Hutt Valley region showed teachers faced verbal abuse, physical attacks in class and had students turn up with weapons or high on drugs.

A survey, released at this week’s PPTA conference, found almost one in 10 teachers surveyed were frightened of students with severe behaviour problems.

Hutt Valley region executive member Martin Henry said delegates yesterday voted to pressure the Government to call a conference where teachers, police, Child Youth and Family and other groups could work directly together.

“It’s not just teachers that are going to solve this problem – there’s a whole lot of societal factors that come in as well,” said Mr Henry. “These students don’t come to schools without a whole lot of issues.”

He said the earlier suggestion to push for timeout rooms in secondary schools as a place to send problem students in the heat of the moment was yesterday withdrawn.

“They were looking at the room and it’s not the room that’s the important thing – it’s what you do with the kids,” said Mr Henry.

Members also voted to push ahead with a controversial plan for the PPTA to work to amend legislation to allow information sharing about students with a history of high-risk behavioural problems that may put members of a school at risk.

Mr Henry said teachers were frustrated to discover new students had behaviour problems they were not warned about because of privacy laws.

“It’s not about blacklisting kids or schools, it’s about doing better things for them.”

Schools in behaviour battle

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http://www.stuff.co.nz/4711549a11.html

Schools in behaviour battle

By JOHN HARTEVELT – The Press | Wednesday, 01 October 2008

High-decile schools grappling with misbehaving students want more help, as a new report reveals they use less than a quarter as many social workers as low-decile schools.

Two teacher conferences under way in Wellington this week are discussing strategies to deal with increasingly extreme incidents of disruptive behaviour in the classroom.

The New Zealand Educational Institute (NZEI), which represents 47,000 primary school staff, yesterday issued guidelines for dealing with troublesome pupils.

NZEI vice-president Ian Leckie said extreme misbehaviour crossed class boundaries.

“You’ve only got to look at the child who is very spoiled and from a very well-to-do background whose mother won’t buy them the lollies in the supermarket,” Leckie said.

“What that indicates, too, is that some of these behaviours even manifest before they start school,” he said.

“The ongoing need to be able to deal with that is very, very clear.”

A report by the New Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER) released today said there was “a very big difference” between the number of social workers in schools based on socio-economic factors.

A survey showed 81 per cent of primary school principals at decile one and two schools had or were considering the introduction of social workers, compared with only 17% of principals in decile nine and 10 schools. Social workers were available or in the offing at 25% of decile three to eight schools.

Leckie said increasing the number of guidance counsellors at primary schools was “an absolute priority”.

“And that is because of the inordinate amount of time that is taken to deal with every incident,” he said.

The Post Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA) opened its conference yesterday, with strong interest from teachers in a workshop to discuss bad behaviour.

“People were all supportive but wanted more, really,” said Martin Henry, who chaired the PPTA workshop.

“Clearly the issue of highly disruptive kids goes across all deciles,” he said.

“It may be that you don’t need a whole social worker in your school but you need access to the sort of resources that you get from CYFS (Child, Youth and Family), from the police and from the other things that are on offer that’s the sort of discussion going around at the moment.”

Henry said there was a systemic problem with the way society dealt with marginal children, but there was more that teachers themselves could do within the classroom.

The NZCER report shows at least half of the nation’s schools had not had training on key areas such as positive approaches to student behaviour. Only one-third of principals said their school could afford the professional development it needed.

“We know that the more professional teachers are the better their impact on kids,” Henry said.

“We want to see more of that and we want to see it more tailored to the individual schools.”

Failing students a costly burden

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Extra funding will NOT solve these problems. Get your children out and home educate them:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/4703349a11.html

Failing students a costly burden

By JOHN HARTEVELT – The Press | Wednesday, 24 September 2008

Troublesome students cost the education system 10 times as much as others, a government report on the state of New Zealand’s schools reveals.

The annual report into the compulsory schools sector in New Zealand, tabled by Education Minister Chris Carter in Parliament yesterday, highlights marginal students as a leading concern.

“One of the most pressing issues our education system faces is supporting students considered to be at risk of educational and societal failure,” the report said.

“Many of these students exhibit behaviour difficulties.”

The report said intervention and support for children with the most severe behavioural problems was critical.

“These behaviours are persistent, outside the age-expected norm and expressed across social settings,” it said.

The public cost of services for children with severe conduct problems was about 10 times that for children of the same age without conduct problems.

“Although most New Zealand students are actively engaged in education, educators face a number of challenges, especially around disciplinary issues, including student safety, school environment and managing difficult behaviours,” the report said.

An earlier report by the Ministry of Social Development found up to 5 per cent of primary and intermediate schoolchildren have a conduct disorder or severe anti-social behaviour.

The report was released hours after a New Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER) survey was circulated by the Post Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA).

The survey of teachers in the greater Wellington area found just over half said the severe behaviour of students limited the activities they would try with their classes.

“From the survey, it is clear that the impact on all of the other students of that disruption is really severe,” PPTA Hutt Valley regional executive member Martin Henry said.

Henry will present a paper on school discipline at next week’s PPTA conference which recommends funding be attached to students identified as a problem.

“These kids are in every classroom and every school and we think they need a funding formula that is attached directly to them,” Henry said.

The NZCER survey found an estimated 9% of students exhibited severely disruptive behaviour.

It also found:

41% of teachers were anxious about the severe behaviour of students.

28% said it made their general health poorer.

32% said that it undermined their confidence.

9% said they were frightened of students with severe behaviour.

REPORT FINDINGS

32% of students who started NCEA in 2005 came out in 2007 with three qualifications an increase from the 26% of the 2002 cohort.

Just over one-fifth (21%) of students of the 2005 cohort came out with no NCEA qualifications down from 25% in 2006.

The number of students leaving school with no qualification of any kind was 18% in 2007, down from 25% in 2006 and 27% in 2005.

In 2007, 81% of 16-year-olds, 61% of 17-year-olds and 13% of 18-year-olds stayed on at school.

Female students achieved at higher rates than males, with 45% attaining at least a university entrance qualification, compared with 33% of male students.

Total government per-student funding of schools increased by 22.2% between 2003 and 2007, compared with an inflation rate of 11.6% over the same period.

During 2007, the Ministry of Education made 53 statutory interventions on school boards, compared with 51 in 2006 and 55 in 2005.

$5.5m ACC payouts for injuries to teachers

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Now we have it, Schools are about “crowd control’

http://www.stuff.co.nz/4700799a11.html

$5.5m ACC payouts for injuries to teachers

By JOHN HARTEVELT – The Press | Monday, 22 September 2008

Millions of dollars are being spent treating teachers hurt in the classroom.

One principal believes the payouts reflect a job more akin to crowd control than education “you don’t expect to be spat at or hit when you’re in this job that you thought was about teaching kids”.

Figures obtained by The Press detail more than $5.49m in Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) payouts to teachers in the year to June 2008.

The ACC figures show:

Teachers in the early-childhood education (ECE) sector were paid $1.54m in the year to June 2008 up from $809,281 in 2004. That figure includes $1.29m for soft-tissue injuries to teachers.Payouts to primary teachers climbed by $1m from $1.49m in 2004 to $2.48m in the year to June 2008. The cost of fractures and dislocations rose from $198,732 to $548,648.Secondary teachers bucked the trend, with payouts falling from $1.65m in 2004 to $1.48m to June 2008.Teachers in special education lodged 36 claims for being struck by a person or an animal in 2008. In 2004, there were 30 such claims costing $43,048.

The chairman of the New Zealand Foundation for Character Education, Rod Galloway, said there would be several reasons for the injuries, but assaults on teachers by students were on the rise.

Last month, The Press revealed a 37 per cent surge nationwide in disciplinary actions against primary-school students between 2000 and 2007.

Galloway, the principal of a Dunedin primary school, said the “extreme” of physical assault on primary-school teachers was now not unusual.

“I hear of it in other schools and it’s not a once-a-year occasion, it’s more frequent than that. And in some cases, they’re dealing with child after child on certain days it’s just a constant battle,” he said.

Teachers were no longer authority figures.

“You wouldn’t have expected, years ago, for teachers to be sworn at and that happens frequently,” Galloway said.

“The way to make teaching attractive for men and women is to say the job is actually teaching and not crowd control and you don’t expect to be spat at or hit when you’re in this job that you thought was about teaching kids.”

There were also mounting physical demands on teachers, causing more injuries, he said.

“There is a physical demand on teachers working with children. The modern teacher doesn’t sit at their desk that might be news to some people.”

Early Childhood Council chief executive Sue Thorne said a greater number of qualified and registered teachers would have contributed to the increase in payouts for teachers in her sector. She said ECE teachers also faced a wider range of physical demands.

“ECE teaching would be more comparable with a number of occupations in the health sector,” Thorne said.

Assaults by children on teachers also were on the rise in ECE.

“I’ve certainly heard of staff who have been left with a bruise or two from being kicked and pummelled by a cross four-and-a-half year old,” Thorne said.

“They can put a bit of weight behind it and do a bit of damage to staff.”

She said more children were coming from dysfunctional homes without good male role models.

Surveys by the Post Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA) have shown secondary school teachers are worried by student misbehaviour with more than 40% experiencing physical intimidation or assault.

A discussion paper to be presented at next week’s PPTA conference states “gangsta-style” behaviour by students has made recruiting teachers difficult at many low-decile schools.

The paper recommends higher salary incentives for teachers who choose to work in hard-to-staff schools.