This article was published on WDRB by Kevin Wheatley and Valerie Chinn on March 1, 2021.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) – Before the COVID-19 pandemic forced Jefferson County Public Schools to quickly transition to remote learning, students had been suspended nearly 16,000 times during the 2019-20 school year.

Since then, overall behavior referrals at JCPS have plummeted as students learn from home.

From the time Kentucky’s largest school district ceased in-person learning in March 2020 through Jan. 21, records obtained by WDRB News show JCPS teachers have written just 218 referrals for student misbehavior during nontraditional instruction.

Students have been written up for using profanity and racial slurs, at times disrupting classes at schools they don’t attend; holding weapons during virtual courses; threatening teachers and classmates; bullying; drug possession; displaying pornography; and other violations.

Most of the infractions were handled in meetings with students and conversations with guardians, with only nine in-school removals reported so far during remote learning.

Katy DeFerrari, assistant superintendent of culture and climate at JCPS, attributed the drop in behavior referrals to the drastically different learning environments students have been in during the COVID-19 pandemic. Students have more freedom at their homes and fewer opportunities to disrupt others than they would inside schools, she said.

“There are certain behaviors that you can engage in at school that at home you can’t, so obviously that means that those types of events aren’t even something that we need to address,” DeFerrari said. “… If they’re feeling wiggly or they need to move around or they need to use the restroom or just different things that might escalate behavior or be part of a progression of behavior during regular school is just a lot less of an issue when you’re in virtual learning.”

The district cannot suspend students during nontraditional instruction because JCPS records student participation instead of minute-by-minute attendance while they’re learning from home, DeFerrari said.

“They’re not going to get removed from their home because they live there, so I would say that the most escalated that we would get in regards to progressive discipline is just maybe a student having to take a break from a live class,” she said.

Teachers have not raised many issues involving student misbehavior other than the series of disruptions at middle and high schools at the beginning of the year that prompted JCPS to temporarily move videoconferencing platforms from Google Meet to Microsoft Teams, Jefferson County Teachers Association Vice President Tammy Berlin said. JCPS teachers now have the choice of either platform.

“I really haven’t heard much from teachers about this since August and early September, which tells me that teachers and principals are just dealing with it at their building level and it’s getting handled,” said Berlin, who teaches at Atherton High School.

Teachers also have more control over their online classes, allowing them to delete written comments, mute disruptive students or remove them entirely with mere mouse clicks.

Berlin believes teachers are spending more time taking matters into their own hands rather than writing behavior referrals.

“It’s definitely just what has been written up,” she said. “I’m sure that there is more that wasn’t. The degree of disruption, profanity and things like that caused during NTI can vary widely. It’s more immediate in the classroom whenever there’s a kid cursing. If it’s digital, then you can just mute the kid and deal with it later.”

DeFerrari says the district has stressed the need for teachers to “record anything” related to student misbehavior. Teachers are also “trying to really be patient” with their students during months of distance learning, she said.

“This is tough, and many of them are experiencing conditions that are less than ideal,” she said. “We have put a lot of emphasis with our staff on let’s try to be patient, use a trauma lens and see what we can do to support the student and family, but we’re not also going to tolerate unsafe situations.”

Carrie Miller says her daughter’s class at Pleasure Ridge Park High School saw a student involved in “sexual behaviors” during a live class in August. The teacher “was able to get a hold on that almost as soon as it happened,” she said.

“I don’t think that the kids seen too much, but more than they should have,” Miller said. “… It disappoints me that kids would even do this.”

No such incident was found in a review of behavior reports provided by JCPS in response to an open records request.

While referrals are down during distance learning, JCPS teachers are still dealing with serious behavior issues.

A Fairdale High School student was written up twice for allegedly threatening to kill one teacher, shoot another and blow up the school in October. The student’s mother claimed she had been hacked.

“This is the second time she used this excuse,” the referral says. “The student sent the threatening message out to two different teachers that she is failing.”

The school referred the student for a district assessment and put them in “time out” during one class period for three days, according to the referral.

At Foster Traditional Academy, a teacher and assistant called the police to conduct a welfare check in November after a student allegedly displayed a gun on screen during class. The student’s father also claimed his son had been hacked.

“He requested a change to the student’s password,” the referral says. “We are working on changing the student’s password.”

The student was removed from class and completed paper assignments for four days as a result and received one-on-one assistance, according to the referral.

In September, a Hawthorne Elementary School student was referred to a mental health counselor after he was seen twirling a cleaver-sized knife by his side during class. The boy’s mother said it was a Halloween prop, the referral says.

JCPS teachers and staff will have an entirely new set of responsibilities when Kentucky’s largest school district resumes in-person classes in the coming weeks: ensuring students adhere to health protocols like masking indoors during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Students who refuse to follow COVID-19 guidelines in schools could eventually be referred to the district’s virtual academy by administrators, according to the classroom reopening plan approved Thursday by the Jefferson County Board of Education.

The district has developed resources for schools to help remind students of expectations during the COVID-19 pandemic, such as visual reminders of proper mask wearing and lessons that can be incorporated by teachers in their classes, DeFerrari said.

Flexibility will be key during the transition from learning at home to learning in classrooms, she said.

“We know students are going to have had a lot of freedoms with their time and with space and, again, the order in which they do things that we’re really trying to factor in,” DeFerrari said, adding that JCPS has developed staff training on interacting with children while wearing masks.

“We’re going to have to help model and have calm, patient conversations to help with that as students are triggered or escalate,” she said. “These are just kind of new things I think we will have to consider and proactively plan for as we get back to school with kids.”

The memorandum of understanding between JCPS and JCTA gives “teeth” to enforcement of COVID-19 guidelines like wearing masks, Berlin said.

The agreement requires principals to address noncompliance with such health protocols, and representatives of the administration and teachers union will be allowed to conduct school walkthroughs if violations continue.

“We’ll have to make sure that masking compliance is happening, and we know that there’s accountability for administration if it doesn’t,” Berlin said.