Just weeks into my time on the education beat, I was listening to a recording of a Cincinnati Public Schools policy meeting, trying to multitask by answering emails as I tuned in. The conversation turned
toward the district's disciplinary policies.
Then, the words of teachers union representative Karen Imbus stunned me: Teachers are being kicked, concussed, bruised, she said.
The union is getting calls every day about this kind of student behavior, she added.
My emails and texts to Imbus and other union members asking for clarification about her comments went unanswered. Requests for teacher assault records from CPS for the 2018-19 to 2025-26 academic years went unanswered, too, before the district handed over the union's "assault leave trackers" for two of those school years, a month later.
Requests for records from Princeton City Schools, Northwest Local Schools and Mason City Schools also largely proved futile. Forest Hills School District officials told me they had zero recorded incidents of school personnel being assaulted in that timeframe. Oak Hills Local Schools said there was one teacher assaulted during that same period.
If the data isn't there, I thought, "Is this a non-issue? Something not worth reporting on?"
But after several interviews and discovering the laws passed recently in Ohio and Kentucky that mandate student expulsions to curb this very problem, my hesitation was swiftly dispelled.
Teacher assaults are a massive problem, Ohio and Kentucky's statewide teachers union officials said – one that goes underreported and unnoticed given a lack of standard reporting requirements for districts. And teachers, like Imbus, are scared to speak out on it for fear of making their employer, the district, look bad.
Other teachers, like Sheri Wooldridge, experience such severe, even life-threatening assaults that the news reports speak for themselves.
After weeks making sense of the vastly different discipline record databases in Ohio and Kentucky, I found that rates of assaults against teachers have, in fact, increased substantially since the COVID-19 pandemic.
And my conversations with union officials, lawmakers and student advocates helped me understand the new expulsion legislation could do more harm than good – to both the teachers reluctant to permanently remove students from their classroom and the students at risk of losing their right to an education.
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: How unanswered emails led to my reporting on assaults on teachers
