|

Teacher Safety in Schools Is a Student Learning Issue

ByDylan Callens

Schools cannot build strong learning cultures on top of unsafe working conditions.

That statement sounds obvious, but many teachers work in systems where safety concerns are treated as isolated behavior incidents rather than as a central condition of teaching and learning. A student threatens a teacher, an object is thrown, a fight erupts, a classroom is repeatedly destabilized, or a staff member is verbally abused. The immediate incident may be documented and processed. Then the school day continues.

What is harder to document is what happens afterward.

The teacher becomes more cautious. Colleagues hear what happened and quietly revise their own expectations about what the school will tolerate. Students watch how adults respond. Some feel less secure. Others test the new boundary. Teachers spend more energy anticipating disruption and less energy experimenting with instruction. A school may still look functional from the outside, but its culture has shifted.

Teacher safety in schools is therefore not only a workplace issue. It is a student learning issue, a retention issue, and a school climate issue.

The numbers should get administrators’ attention

National data shows that threats and physical aggression toward educators are not rare enough to dismiss as exceptional events. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, during the 2020–21 school year 8 percent of elementary public school teachers and 4 percent of secondary public school teachers reported being threatened with injury by a student from their school. Seven percent of elementary teachers and 1 percent of secondary teachers reported being physically attacked.

Those percentages translate into real people working in real classrooms. They also come from a school year when in-person contact was reduced in many places because of pandemic disruptions, so the data should be read with that context in mind.

More recent research on teacher working conditions suggests that safety and student behavior continue to matter. A 2025 CALDER working paper indexed by ERIC found that teacher working conditions continued to decline after the peak pandemic period, including teachers’ reports of classroom disruptions, student responsibility, and safety. The researchers also found declining trust between teachers and principals, parents, and colleagues.

Another 2024 study of teacher-directed violence, published in Psychology in the Schools, examined the experiences of 403 teachers who said their most upsetting incident of violence contributed to a desire to leave teaching, transfer, or retire. Teachers described safety concerns, strained community relationships, and lack of administrative support among the factors that shaped those decisions.

The message is difficult to ignore: when educators believe that unsafe or aggressive behavior will not be handled effectively, the effects do not end when the incident report is filed.

Safety changes how teachers teach

Most teachers enter the profession expecting difficult days. They know students will argue, test limits, make poor choices, and sometimes arrive at school carrying stress that affects their behavior. Teachers do not expect perfection.

What changes a teacher’s relationship with the job is the feeling that serious behavior has become normalized.

A teacher who is worried about escalation teaches differently. Group work may feel risky. A lab may feel risky. Allowing students to move freely around the room may feel risky. A challenging discussion may be avoided because the teacher is unsure whether conflict can be contained. The teacher may choose the safer worksheet over the richer activity—not because the teacher lacks creativity, but because classroom conditions make creativity harder to sustain.

This is an invisible instructional cost of unsafe schools. The most engaging teaching often requires trust: trust that students will follow safety procedures, trust that a disagreement will remain respectful, trust that a correction will not trigger a major confrontation, and trust that support will arrive when a classroom problem exceeds what one adult can reasonably manage.

When that trust disappears, instruction narrows.

The emotional cost accumulates

Teacher stress is not caused by one thing. Workload, compensation, staffing, administrative demands, academic gaps, family communication, and the sheer complexity of teaching all play a role. But student behavior repeatedly appears in research as a major source of stress.

In a RAND report on teacher well-being, managing student behavior was among teachers’ top sources of job-related stress. Twenty-three percent of teachers surveyed in January 2023 said they were likely to leave their job at their school by the end of that school year. RAND cautioned that intentions do not perfectly predict actual departures, but the finding still reflects how many educators were seriously considering leaving.

RAND’s later 2024 findings continued to show substantial differences between teachers and other working adults on frequent job-related stress, difficulty coping with that stress, and burnout.

Behavior problems become especially demoralizing when teachers believe they are expected to solve school-wide problems individually. A staff member can be highly skilled at classroom management and still need administrative help with repeated aggression, threats, harassment, chronic defiance, or unsafe conduct. Asking teachers to respond to every problem through relationship-building alone misunderstands both relationships and leadership.

Relationships matter enormously. They do not eliminate the need for boundaries, consequences, safety plans, or coordinated intervention.

Students notice whether adults are protected

Discipline is often framed as something adults do to students. That framing misses how carefully students observe the way a school protects its community.

When a teacher is verbally abused and nothing appears to happen, students learn something. When a serious threat is minimized, students learn something. When a student who has disrupted several classes returns without a plan and immediately repeats the behavior, students learn something.

The students who are most affected are not always the ones involved in the incident. A quiet student may start choosing a seat near the door. A student who has experienced violence outside school may become anxious when arguments escalate. A student who wants to participate may stop raising a hand because the classroom feels unpredictable. A student who respects the teacher may become frustrated that disrespect appears to carry no consequence.

Safety is part of belonging. The CDC’s work on school connectedness links feeling cared for, supported, and connected at school with better attendance, stronger academic outcomes, and lower levels of several health and risk concerns. A school that wants students to feel connected cannot treat physical and emotional safety as secondary.

Teacher retention is also a student issue

When poor working conditions push teachers out, students pay the price again.

The Learning Policy Institute notes that teacher turnover remains high nationally and that replacing a departing teacher can cost a large district roughly $25,000 on average in 2024 dollars when separation, recruitment, hiring, and training costs are included. More importantly, turnover disrupts instructional continuity and contributes to staffing shortages.

A school that repeatedly loses experienced teachers also loses informal leadership, mentoring capacity, curricular knowledge, extracurricular programs, and relationships with families. New teachers arrive needing support, and the remaining staff must absorb additional responsibilities. If student behavior and safety concerns are part of why people are leaving, failing to address those concerns creates a cycle: difficult conditions lead to turnover, turnover weakens capacity, and weakened capacity makes behavior harder to manage.

Retention strategies that focus only on appreciation events, wellness activities, or motivational messaging will not solve a working-conditions problem.

Teachers feel valued when the systems around them make it possible to do their jobs well.

Administrative support has to be visible

Teachers do not need administrators to agree with them in every conflict. Fair school leadership requires listening to students, gathering facts, considering disability-related needs, recognizing bias, and ensuring that consequences are proportional and equitable.

But support cannot be invisible.

When a serious incident occurs, teachers need timely follow-up. They need to know what the next step is. They need clarity about whether the student is returning, what conditions have changed, what supports are in place, and what to do if the behavior happens again. If another staff member was injured or threatened, colleagues should see that leadership has responded responsibly without violating student privacy.

Silence creates uncertainty, and uncertainty is filled with rumor.

Strong principals establish processes before a crisis happens. Staff should know which behaviors require immediate office involvement, who responds to emergencies, how to document an incident, how families are contacted, how re-entry is handled, and when a safety plan is required. They should not have to invent the process while adrenaline is still high.

Accountability and support belong together

Improving teacher safety does not require administrators to adopt a purely exclusionary discipline model. Removing students from school without addressing underlying needs can create additional problems, and discipline data has long shown disparities in who receives exclusionary consequences.

The answer is not to choose between accountability and support.

The CDC’s guidance on restorative practices describes effective restorative work as combining high accountability with high support. That balance is useful for school leaders. A student who has caused harm may need counseling, skill-building, special education supports, mental health services, a behavior plan, or a restorative conference. The same student may also need a clear consequence, a structured re-entry, limits on certain privileges, or a different setting for a period of time.

Support answers the question, “What does this student need to succeed?” Accountability answers the question, “What must change so other people are safe and learning can continue?”

Schools need both questions.

What system leaders can do now

District and board leaders should examine staff safety with the same seriousness they bring to academic achievement data. That means looking beyond the number of suspensions or office referrals and asking whether staff members actually feel safe and supported.

Useful indicators include the frequency of threats, aggression, and classroom removals; repeat incidents involving the same students; response times when staff call for help; the number of teachers who say behavior interferes with instruction; staff perceptions of administrative backing; absenteeism related to stress; and turnover patterns in high-incident schools or programs.

Leaders should also examine whether policies are operationally realistic. A discipline policy may sound thoughtful on paper but fail if administrators are too overloaded to implement it, special education supports are understaffed, alternative spaces do not exist, or teachers are expected to complete extensive documentation before receiving help.

A policy that cannot be carried out consistently is not a policy. It is an aspiration.

Safety is not anti-student

One reason school discipline conversations become so polarized is the assumption that protecting teachers means taking something away from students.

In reality, students benefit when the adults around them are safe enough to teach well.

They benefit when experienced teachers stay. They benefit when classrooms can run labs, discussions, performances, projects, and collaborative work without fear of escalation. They benefit when adults model calm conflict resolution and meaningful accountability. They benefit when students who are struggling with behavior receive intervention before their patterns become more serious.

Teacher safety and student support are not competing goals. They are parts of the same healthy-school system.

A message to principals and system administrators

Teachers understand that schools cannot eliminate conflict. They understand that some students have significant needs, that behavior is communication, and that adolescents make mistakes.

What they need from leadership is confidence that serious behavior will not simply be redistributed back into the classroom without a plan.

When staff members raise safety concerns, listen before explaining. When patterns appear, respond before they become culture. When a teacher calls for help, treat the request as information about the system—not as evidence that the teacher has failed.

Most teachers will work extraordinarily hard for students when they believe the school is working with them.

But no amount of dedication can permanently compensate for a system that normalizes unsafe conditions.

Protecting teachers is not separate from protecting learning. It is one of the ways schools make learning possible.

Sources

This is the second article in a four-part series on school discipline, staff morale, student safety, and the learning environment. Read Part One: School Discipline Problems Are Becoming a Learning Problem.