School leaders must not allow parents to send their violent children to schools without holding these adults accountable for their roles and responsibilities as parents. We cannot continue to allow misbehaving youth to contaminate school environments and intimidate youngsters who do want to achieve. It is unfair to allow a small percentage of students to disrupt and interfere with the good work of classroom teachers and their students. Some would argue that if we don’t allow them in school, then they’ll just engage in nonproductive and violent activity outside of schools. Others would argue that they can’t be allowed in schools because teachers are either afraid of them or simply not equipped to manage their behavioral problems. Violent young people must be supervised and mentored in educational settings that are tailored to their needs; regular public schools cannot accommodate these needs. Teaching professionals are trained to teach not serve as law enforcers; we need to let the teachers teach and transfer behaviorally challenged students to places that are equipped to deal with their personal challenges.

Parents are responsible for knowing how well or not their children are performing in school as well as whether they are disrupting classroom time. Classroom teachers communicate with parents regularly via progress reports, emails, telephone calls, and school visitations. Moms and dads are responsible for following through on feedback and reporting received from teachers about academic progress and classroom conduct. There are no good reasons for parents to plead ignorance about a child’s problems in school other than sheer denial or parental neglect. Aside from many parents refusing to believe that their child could be disruptive in the classroom, there are certainly many adults who are simply absent from the lives of their schoolchildren and do not have a clue about or any interest in knowing what’s going on with them in school. This latter group of parents is very often the reason why some students exhibit violent behavior in school. Trying to hold absentee and negligent parents accountable is pretty much impossible, so we have to create ways of providing mentors and personal coaches for their children as they navigate their time in school.