Operation Better Schools and Teachers?

     I will try to make this short and sweet (we'll see how well I fare...), but I wanted to address an issue relative to school operation and delegation and responsibilities. In our class discussion, we talked about curriculum standards and the debate about imposing standards upon public schools, and not private. One of my peers brought up the issue of staff size and responsibilities. In some cases, public school administration does not have time to set down and design their own curriculum and set their own standards because they have so many other additional responsibilities (due in part to limited funding) and their time is spread very thinly. She pointed out that at the school her mom worked at as a principal, the greater portion of her time was spent running around trying to help teachers control misbehaving students and mediate behavioral crises because there was no Dean of Students due in part to a lack of funding.

This sort of got my brain thinking about yet another issue.

     Being that one of my primary focuses in my studies/thesis is how different support systems (the  family, school, or legal system) are failing and/or supporting students struggling with truancy or substance abuse problems, I am interested in how the education system intervenes in behavioral crises. During my three years of experience working at juvenile courthouse, I had the great privilege of overseeing a case in a different school district with one of the probation officers in which a student (I do not recall what grade he was in, but it either elementary or middle school) got involved with the court due to misbehavior. I should also mention that this was a fairly decent school in comparison to the schools that our court typically came into with, and it was a little surprising. Halfway through the CHINS (Child In Need of Services) report filed by the school (articulated in a very.... dramatic and intense manner), we learned that the child often talked back to the teacher, refused to do any work, and the last straw that led to the report, was caught chewing gum in class and refused to spit it out (chewing gum is against their rules). My initial reaction was to laugh hysterically. This kid is probably like "Why the hell am I going to court for this.... " The way the report was written, one would have thought he committed first degree murder before finishing the report. Nope, just chewing gum....
     My second reaction was to wonder how the hell this teacher was hired. As soon as you become a teacher, I feel like you need to be prepared for all types of students with different backgrounds --  different attitudes, different learning styles, and different upbringings. If a teacher cannot handle a student who is simply disobeying or god forbid, chewing gum, then maybe they picked the wrong career out of the sorting hat because that does not require legal intervention. What concerns me more, aside from this excessive fear of chewing gum, is that from a smaller picture, one would say that funding should go to a larger staff (as somewhat implied in class) because larger schools have bigger crises and even they tend to try to deal with it for a bit before resorting to legal intervention. So does that say something about this anti-chewing gum, small town school and their population of possibly overwhelmed staff? Maybe.
     But I think the more crucial question is not whether the number of staff influences improvement in schools, but the quality of the staff and whether these teachers should be equipped to be knowledgeable about these different backgrounds. Is that their responsibility? Should they have to teach x amount of students AND make sure they can address the needs of each individual student and investigate every possible factor that could potentially be influencing their academic performance or behavior? And what about after some factors are identified? What if this child comes from a neglectful family? Should the teacher be inclined to intervene? And if not, then who?