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The exterior of the Clark County School District’s headquarters in Las Vegas.
Tuesday, March 29, 2022 | 2 a.m.
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A quarter of the support staff in the Clark County School District say they’ve felt threatened by a student or parent in the last year, and more than half say they feel less safe at work.
A recent survey by the Education Support Employees Association union outlines a litany of verbal and physical abuse and assault complaints from staffers such as classroom aides, bus drivers, office and kitchen staff, and campus security monitors.
“I have heard and seen enough at two different schools to wonder every single day which day is gonna be the day that it’s my turn to get punched, shot or threatened,” one staffer wrote. “The whole environment of schools now is just dangerous and toxic.”
Union President Jan Giles said the survey, which yielded more than 500 anonymous responses, found 27% of staffers felt threatened by a student in the last year, while 23% felt threatened by a parent.
Thirty percent reported a violent act to their supervisor or administrator, and 54% said they felt less safe at work than in previous years.
Violence in schools has gripped CCSD this year, coinciding with the return to full-time, in-person learning after a year in pandemic shutdown.
“Those numbers may not seem overwhelming, but they are. A significant number of your support professionals have experienced some act of violence toward them and a majority do not feel safe,” Giles told officers of the School Board last week. “This is alarming. These numbers, as well as the individual responses, support what we hear about every single day.”
Staffers said they’ve been sworn at, called names, punched, slapped, kicked, pushed, shoved, pinched, tripped, head butted, shaken, bitten and spit on.
Students have pulled staffers’ hair out, scratched them until they have bled, kicked them in the groin, and hit them with backpacks and classroom objects, according to the survey.
Students throw rocks, shoes, food, furniture, computers and hand sanitizer bottles at them, the survey said.
Employees have tumbled to the ground and suffered dislocated joints, broken bones, torn muscles and concussions, often in the midst of breaking up fights, according to the survey.
One staffer reported being stabbed with a pencil by a first-grader.
That’s just from children.
Parents storm offices and buses to yell and intimidate, the survey said. Impatient drivers curse at staffers and veer dangerously close as they try to enforce traffic safety during school pick-up and drop-off.
One staffer wrote that they stopped doing crossing guard duty after a parent almost ran them over.
“Parents seem to be more unhinged than in years past,” another wrote.
Respondents overwhelmingly asked for more police and private security officers on campus, metal detectors, more suspensions and expulsions for problem students, training on how to best respond to attacks and more freedom to defend themselves. They want referrals to special schools for students with behavioral issues expanded — CCSD has three behavioral schools; the district shut down four in the 2010s for low enrollment — and they want more physical security measures, including surveillance cameras, fencing and controlled entry doors to keep aggressive parents and passersby from easily entering.
For kids and parents, staffers want more accountability – immediate, consistent corrective action and removal. “Real consequences,” as at least one respondent put it.
“We definitely don’t get paid enough to deal with the foolishness that we deal with on a regular basis,” one person said.
Clark County School District Police logged 6,827 calls for violent crimes over the first seven months of this school year.
While not every call equals an actual incident, and dispatch logs don’t show whether the alleged perpetrators and victims were adults or students, 775 of those calls resulted in an arrest or citation, mostly for fighting, assault and battery.
