Recent coverage of an honor student being beaten to death during afterschool hours is indeed a sobering reminder that there are still groups of young people who engage in bullying, fighting, and other forms of violent behavior as means to ends that we are still struggling to comprehend. The brutal beating of the teenager reminds us that not only do some youth not value education in their own lives but they attend school everyday harassing and intimidating youngsters who are diligently pursuing educational achievement. Educators, social service workers, law enforcement officers, and others have worked for years developing programs that target students who are disruptive in classrooms and resort to violent misconduct to resolve their problems. Alternative schools have been established to isolate this group of students to try to provide individualized instruction and mentoring for them. Even though we would ultimately prefer that disruptive students be integrated into the general population of students, a period of time away from the routine school environment has proven to be helpful for addressing their personal, social, and educational concerns before being allowed to return. Ultimately though, bullying, fighting, and violent behavior by school aged youth are a function of unresolved problems and circumstances in the personal, familial, and social lives of these youngsters. Young people are not naturally aggressive and violent to the point of beating another person to death. Such severe actions and reactions emanate from moral deficiencies and other challenges in their everyday lives.

Schools are not equipped or responsible for correcting the breadth of deficiencies in the lives of their students. However, educators are doing their best to partner with other professionals to try to mitigate the negative consequences that may occur as a result. School social workers, counselors, school psychologists, mentors, local churches, mental health professionals, and social service organizations are essential for helping school officials and teachers understand what strategies and interventions work best. Their professional expertise in dealing with students who come from families and communities that are impacted by domestic violence, mental and physical abuse, drug addiction, alcoholism, high unemployment, prostitution, and gang violence, to name a few, helps assuage the fears, anxieties, anger, and insecurities that hinder the academic performance of students whose lives are affected by these kinds of challenges. Teachers work closely with all of these practitioners to develop a plan of action that makes the most sense in the context of a student’s situation. This level of individualized supervision is the only way possible to even have a fighting chance of helping some students. What’s even more sobering is that in order to respond to the students’ needs effectively, districts have to hire specialized personnel who tend to be expensive but indispensable to any efforts aimed at responding to the harsh realities confronting some of our most disruptive and violent youth. This is truly money well spent if you consider not only the potential effects on student populations but also the impact on neighborhoods, communities, and society at large.