The disturbing incident at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, SC, where a school resource officer — a deputy sheriff — wrenched an uncooperative student from her desk Monday and dragged her out of the classroom struck a chord with me.
In nine years as a substitute teacher since retiring from The Star in 2006, I have experience dealing with students who are difficult to “redirect,” as we say in the teaching business. For those unfamiliar with the term in the school setting, redirecting is simply calling a student’s attention to inappropriate behavior or conduct and getting him or her back on board the lesson or activity at hand.
But let’s back up to the Spring Valley incident. Video showed Sheriff’s Deputy Ben Fields dealing with a 16-year-old girl who had refused to stand and leave her math class, after her teacher reportedly caught her using her phone.
After an administrator and Deputy Fields arrived, both asked the girl to leave several times and requested that she cooperate. She remained quietly in her desk as they continued to ask her to leave and then, apparently with no warning, Deputy Fields grabbed the girl, flipped her desk over and dragged her to the front of the classroom, where he cuffed her hands behind her. One student said he saw the deputy put his knee on her as he tried to arrest her.
One of the oddities of the video is that only two other students can be seen clearly, and both appear absorbed in their work at the outset of the incident and then appear only slightly distracted from their work as the officer extracts the girl from her desk and drags her away. After the deputy has the girl on the floor in the front of the classroom, he says, “Gimme your hands; gimme your hands.”
Before you read any farther, I urge you to view the video, which is linked in this NYT story.
By any measure, the video is shocking, and it’s clear that Deputy Fields badly overreacted.
So much so that Sheriff Leon Lott, his supervisor, has washed his hands of him — suspending him and saying he will never return to school duty anywhere. Deputy Fields could also be in deep legal trouble. The Columbia office of the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of South Carolina have opened a civil rights investigation into the incident.
FBI Special Agent in Charge David Thomas said in a statement Tuesday, “The FBI will collect all available facts and evidence in order to determine whether a federal law was violated.”
At the very least, the girl’s family will almost certainly file a civil suit against Deputy Fields, and my guess is the family will win a significant monetary judgment.
Some of more than 1,000 people who already have commented on today’s New York Times story on the Spring Valley incident have defended the officer’s response. One person said that once the girl refused to leave the classroom, she was, in effect, trespassing and that Deputy Fields was justified in resorting to violence to uproot her.
That’s utter balderdash, of course. We’re talking about a public school, a public school the student had been going to every day.
Certainly, though, something had to be done. Administrators couldn’t just shrug their shoulders and say, “Never mind” and let the girl continue using her phone in violation of school rules — or let her stay in the classroom indefinitely after she refused to leave.
For sure, in my experience, similar situations can be very, very challenging.
A couple of times, I have had to call a school office and summon administrators to collect a student who refused to be redirected and then refused to leave the room. Fortunately, in those instances, the students got up and left when administrators arrived.
My worst handling of an incident occurred in my early substitute days. It was at William Chrisman High School in Independence. I let a girl in an English class get under my skin because she was fiddling with a case of some sort and she was very slow in responding to my directive to put the case away.
(I should note here that the girl wasn’t really disrupting the other students, she was just being inattentive. I learned from that incident, and similar ones, that the best thing to do when a student is “off task” but not bothering anyone else is simply ignore them. It’s just not worth the time and emotional energy to make a big deal out of it.)
Where I made my biggest mistake was after approaching the girl’s desk, I placed my index finger on her knee and said, “Put the case away!” With that, she jumped up, started screaming, “He touched me! He touched me!” and ran out of the classroom and down the hall to the office.
Immediately I realized I had screwed up royally. I didn’t hear anything for a few days, but then a school administrator summoned me to the school for an interview. Her immediate intent was to determine if I had been guilty of sexual harassment. Fortunately, she quickly determined that was not the case, that it was just a terribly misguided attempt at redirection.
The official told me to never touch a student below the shoulders and to never touch a student at all in a “redirecting” situation. The official also banned me — for my own good and that of the student — from substituting at Chrisman in the future.
It was a tremendous lesson for me in dealing with difficult classroom situations. As you might imagine, I’ve never touched a student in a redirecting situation since then and never will.
…Now, back to the Spring Valley case. Like I said, something had to be done because the girl was not only disobeying school rules but flouting authority.
Had I been the administrator, the first thing I would have done was to take charge of the situation and not defer to the officer. The officer should be secondary to the administrator, unless a fight is in progress or a student is attacking a teacher or administrator.
After telling the officer to give me the opportunity to handle it, I would have carefully considered the options. As in my situation with the girl at Chrisman, there was no compelling reason to rush to a showdown.
To me, the main options would have been:
:: Turning the German-Shepherd sheriff’s deputy loose on the girl.
:: Allowing the girl to stay where she was and immediately call a parent and have the parent talk to the student on the phone or ask the parent to come to the school. (I realize that might not have been possible on short notice, but it still should have been considered before resorting to mayhem.)
:: Waiting until the bell rang for the end of the period. At that point, the girl probably would have gotten up as other students entered the room and took their seats for the next class. Staying put would have put her in a very awkward position.
:: Asking the other students to leave the room and stand in the hallway or take them to an empty classroom. That would have isolated the recalcitrant student and probably prompted her to end her sit-in.
The point is the administrator had a number of viable options and the girl had very few. She had leverage at the moment, but her standoff would soon come to a natural end as the school routine unfolded.
Where the administrator and Deputy Fields erred badly — as I did at Chrisman — was immediately submitting to a power struggle with the girl: Who’s gonna win? You gonna win? Oh, no. We’re gonna win. Just watch and see!
Now the deputy has cost himself his job, and the administrator has demonstrated he or she was incapable of calmly and professionally defusing what was, initially, just a knotty situation.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
I won’t comment on the violence of the video, but I do have something to say about the distraction such students may cause even though it is not visible on videos. Bad behavior has the effect of holding the entire classroom of 25 or more students hostage. Nobody is learning, and if the kids are apparently minding their lessons, believe me, they are just trying to stay invisible. This isn’t a benign event. Your child has a maximum of 180 days to learn, so one lost lesson is not easily dismissed. And the damage is compounded for every event, so one disruptive student can essentially ruin an entire class experience for that year. Get these people out of the classroom. I subbed for eight years, and am no expert on teaching, but there’s nothing like being a stranger in a new classroom to give you a challenge! (Chrisman, by reputation, would make my high school a piece of cake. You probably deserve a medal for persevering.) OK, just to be clear: One way or another, it just doesn’t do to let one student control the other students and the teacher and the administrators. Such students need to leave, never violently, but they need to leave NOW. So bring in two or three resource officers or whatever it takes. Humoring them, which happens all to often, just worsens the situation.
Point one, would this DOJ mentioned in the NYT piece be the same corrupt DOJ that just gave a pass to Lois Lerner, the woman who certainly appears to have committed multiple felonies, and the same DOJ that has also repeatedly pandered to the criminal element in our society?
As for Sheriff Lott, his entire department would be justified in walking off the job over his failure to support an officer confronted by a student who failed repeatedly to follow his lawful commands.
You are sadly correct that our ludicrous legal system probably will reward this thug for her misconduct, encouraging others to follow in her path.
And, Mr. Kennedy is exactly correct, this thug was disrupting the learning experience of students who drastically need that experience if they are ever to have a decent chance in life. This officer should be rewarded for sending a message, loud and clear, to the other thugs in that school that misconduct and disrupting the class will not be tolerated.
Lyndon Johnson should be dug up and tried for crimes against humanity for the damage his war on the impoverished has done in destroying the black family and creating a feral underclass that no longer embraces societal norms of correct behavior. Until the message is sent that society will no longer tolerate this kind of conduct it will simply grow and flourish.
Thanks to a corrupt DOJ, an idiotic sheriff and schools that aren’t worth saving anymore, this is now the new norm of our Great Society. Enjoy it now because it’s only going to get worse as we sink to the level of a third world dungheap.
Other than that, it was a nice piece, Fitz ;-)
Like I said, one of the oddities was that it appeared there were not many students in the classroom and the two that are seen in the video weren’t paying any attention whatsoever to the showdown. Both students were very slow to react to Deputy Fields’ “takedown,” as if it caught them completely by surprise. All the more reason to avoid a confrontation. If the girl was disrupting class, it sure didn’t show up on the video.
Did I hear you call the girl — the girl who refused to leave the classroom — a thug?
That’s a convenient, pulse-pushing term to throw out, but it doesn’t apply here, at all. You can quote the jimmycsays dictionary on the meaning of the word thug: “One who who beats people up, mugs ’em, kills ’em, robs ’em, engages in cowardly assaults and shows no mercy.” Not a 16-year-old, balking student who sits on her hands and says, “I won’t go.”
Ok, you got me on the definition, I’ll think of something else.
I don’t want to start a war on words here, but Tupac has a whole other definition of thug that could very well apply to this girl. Maybe he’s pulse-pushing, too, I don’t know.
Fitz avoided the racial context, but this is also a black and white issue–the officer is white, and the girl is black. The officer has a pending lawsuit against him accusing him of unfairly targeting black students and accusing them of being gang members.
Thug has become racial code and by using it in this context, altevogt reveals his bigoted feelings. I am sure he will quickly and self-righteously deny it, but I am positive that if a white girl were sitting in a classroom in the same circumstances, he would not label her a thug.
No Mike, as usual you’ve revealed your bias. Those familiar with my Facebook page with know that I view this as a class issue, not a racial one (hence my comment about a “feral underclass”, a lumpen proletariat for the Marxists in the crowd). The reason it is viewed as a racial issue is because the Democrat Party benefits greatly at the ballot box from perpetuating racism and racial division and their overt policy of welfare colonialism.
The real code here, Mike, and the one that just doesn’t work like it used to is trying to tar someone as a racist for pointing out inconvenient facts. In essence, that’s simply code for “I’m incapable of formulating a rational response to the argument so I’ll stoop to libel instead.”
In this case, white girl, black girl, makes no difference, my response would probably been to have tazed the recalcitrant student before dragging her fat ass out onto the floor and cuffing her.
Have a nice day, Mike.
Just trying to tar someone as racist who uses racist language, language that you retracted as inappropriate. When I pointed out the context that made it inappropriate, you begin ranting about the Democratic Party (but for some reason didn’t tie in The Kansas City Star). I have no doubt you also would have tazed and inflicted violence on a similarly situated nonviolent white girl–that’s just the kind of haircut you are–but you would not have called her a thug.
You expressed it a lot better than I did, Mike — code word for racism. Now, let’s let John spew.
The same day the recalcitrant student was body slammed to the floor a student body slammed a principal to the floor, but alas, no media firestorm for that incident.
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2015/10/what-double-standard-white-principal-body-slammed-to-ground-by-black-student-media-silent/
The local news report. http://fox40.com/2015/10/27/florin-high-school-principal-shoved-to-floor-students-arrested/
And here is another example of Mike’s stunning logical repartee in action wherein the phrase “hard worker” is deemed racist by one of MSNBC’s intellectuals.
http://dailycaller.com/2015/10/26/msnbc-host-when-republicans-say-the-phrase-hard-worker-theyre-being-racist-video/
Thank you, done spewing.
It may be helpful to get all the information out before we draw too many conclusions, at least about the chain of events. As of this moment,per CNN, there are three known videos of the incident. I don’t see how one can say the students were not distracted, since they knew the officer was coming and got their cell phones cranked up. One of the videos seems to show the student punching the officer. Stay tuned!
Kudos to Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott, who today fired Deputy Fields…Didn’t put him on paid or unpaid leave. Didn’t say “we’ve got to get all the facts.” (If ever a picture, or video, was worth 1,000 words, this is it.) Just fired him outright, basically for stupidity.
“Deputy Fields did not follow proper training, did not follow proper procedure, when he threw the student across the room,” Sheriff Lott said at a news conference in Columbia.
I guess the deputy sheriffs haven’t managed to mount much of a union in Richland County. In this case, that’s good news.
It would seem that i apologized prematurely.
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/sheriff-says-third-video-shows-south-carolina-student-punching-officer-n452481
With baited breath, I’m awaiting the video that shows the girl flipping former Deputy Fields with a nifty jiu-jitsu move.
When I was teaching back in the 70s on a brutally hot afternoon, I let my class, one by one, dart out of the classroom and across the hallway for a drink at the water fountain. I warned all of them to keep quiet, so we wouldn’t get caught. They all thought it a marvelous adventure. As I could see that the student at the fountain was almost finished, I touched the next student on the shoulder to give them a gentle nudge for their turn at the fountain. About mid-line when I touched one boy’s shoulder, he jerked away and said, “Don’t touch me”. Yeah, I guess it was a racial thing. PS, we didn’t get caught, and after they had all had a drink, they settled down and we got some productive work done in the rest of the afternoon.
I always thought substitute teachers were particularly brave.
Columnist Mr. Pitt’s provides a good perspective on this matter:
Leonard Pitts Jr.: ‘Nothing to do with race’ is a naive worldview
Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/syndicated-columnists/article42211899.html#storylink=cpy
It had nothing to do with race. So said Sheriff Leon Lott in discussing a violent arrest by one of his officers, a white deputy named Ben Fields, of a black female student at Spring Valley High School in Richland County, S.C.
Fields, a school resource officer, was called in when the girl reportedly ignored a teacher’s instruction to stop using her cellphone and leave the classroom. He ended up overturning her desk and slinging her across the floor like a sandbag or a sack of dog food.
His actions, caught on cellphone video, have detonated social media, many observers expressing visceral fury over this treatment of a black child. But Lott, who later fired his deputy, said he doesn’t think Fields acted from racial prejudice because he has an African-American girlfriend.
It is a statement of earnest, staggering obtuseness that sheds no light on the officer’s overreaction, but reveals with stark clarity the simplistic way many of us perceive the all-American conundrum of race.
Granted, it is not inconceivable that a white girl could have been subjected to the same brutality in a similar situation. But it is a matter of statistical fact that it’s more likely to happen to a child of color.
Many studies have shown that those kids are subjected to harsher discipline in school than their white classmates. Indeed, numbers released last year by the federal government show that this begins in preschool, where the “students” are little more than toddlers. Yet black kids, who account for 18 percent of the population, get 42 percent of the suspensions.
Nothing to do with race?
The people who habitually say that operate under the misapprehension that racial bias requires intent or awareness and that it leaves obvious evidence of itself: a tendency toward racist comments, let’s say, or membership in the Ku Klux Klan. In that worldview, racial bias is incompatible with having a black girlfriend.
But that worldview is naive. Bias is frequently subterranean, something you carry without meaning to or knowing that you do. In a country that has used every outlet of media, religion, education, politics, law and science for more than two centuries to drive home that black is threatening, black is inferior, black is bad, it is entirely possible Fields could have acted from unconscious racial bias and yet had a black girlfriend.
For that matter, he could have acted from unconscious racial bias and had a black face. African-American people are no more immune to the drumbeat of negativity surrounding them than anyone else.
So “nothing to do with race” is a reflexive cop-out that many of us embrace against all reason, because to do otherwise is to face a mirror whose reflection does not flatter. Which is why the usual suspects — Steve Doocy, Mark Fuhrman, Glenn Beck, etc. — have attempted to fix the blame for what happened in South Carolina on the girl.
Let’s be very clear in response. It doesn’t matter whether she was disruptive. It doesn’t matter whether she was disobedient. It doesn’t matter whether she was disrespectful. Those things justify discipline, but they emphatically do not justify this child being lifted and flung by a grown man as if she were an inanimate object. If she were white, that would likely go without saying.
One is reminded of all the other African-Americans we have seen in just the last few years brutalized and even killed for no good reason. One is reminded of Trayvon Martin and Walter Scott and Eric Garner and Charnesia Corley and Oscar Grant and Tamir Rice and Sean Bell and Levar Jones and more names than this column has space to hold, more blood than conscience can contain. And how many times have we been offered the same simplistic assurance in response?
This had nothing to do with race, they say. Of course not. It never does.
Leonard Pitts: lpitts@miamiherald.com
Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/syndicated-columnists/article42211899.html#storylink=cpy