School Principal, Superintendent Attacked

Safety at Work

Charlotte, NC (WorkersCompensation.com) – A North Carolina mother was arrested last month after she attacked a school principal and grabbed a school district superintendent by the neck, police said.

The attack comes as officials say teachers and other school staff members are increasingly victims of physical confrontation.

According to the Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Office, Mariah Hector, 33, was charged with assaulting an employee of Randolph Middle School in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District and trespassing in the second degree.

Officials said Hector went to the school after her daughter called her to report she’d been involved in a fight. Hector, along with other family members, asked to speak to school staff. As she was talking to staff members, she reportedly became hostile and was asked by a school employee to leave.

Reports said Hector refused to leave and pushed past an employee to get to school principal Jennifer Schroeder. Hector then shoved Schroeder into a wall. Hector then grabbed area assistant superintendent, Jennifer Dean “with both hands around her neck and attempted to choke her.”

Police said Dean never lost consciousness but had visible signs of injury and had difficulty breathing. The school was placed on lockdown during the incident.

The same day, another person was charged with trespassing at the school. Police said Trinity Nixon, 20, was charged with second-degree trespassing after she entered the school and began yelling and cursing. Nixon had previously been told not to enter the school by a school employee.

The incidents came after Schroeder was suspended with pay last month. The district told media outlets that Schroeder was suspended May 20. In a message to the school’s families, the school district said Schroeder would be “away from campus at this time,” and that the district could not provide information as to why because the matter was a personnel issue.

“We understand that this adjustment in leadership may cause some concerns but rest assured that this will not affect the daily operations of the school,” a spokesperson wrote in the email.

The incident comes as researchers said teachers are being victimized not only by students, but by their school’s responses to the events.

According to a report from the National Institute of Justice, teachers are increasingly facing verbal, physical and psychological abuse by students that can damage a teacher’s emotional, psychological and physical well-being.

The impact of the abuse is often dependent on how the school reacts, the report said.

The research, led by investigators at the University of Texas at San Antonio and the Rochester Institute of Technology, looked at trends and predictors of teacher victimization, negative consequences of victimization and administrator responses to it by collecting data from middle and high school teachers in Texas. Through four surveys, the teachers were asked about seven different types of teacher victimization: theft/vandalism, physical assault, sexual abuse/harassment, verbal abuse, nonphysical-contact aggression, cyberbullying, and in-person bullying.

Only 17 percent of the survey respondents said they had not experienced any victimization. About half of the respondents (about 45 percent) reported verbal abuse, and between 29 and 33 percent reported nonphysical-contact aggression. The report found that physical victimization was far less prevalent, with between 5 and 8 percent reporting physical assault and between 6 and 11 percent reporting sexual abuse or harassment.

In instances where teachers experienced physical assault, only three quarters (74 percent) reported the incident to school officials or the police. In half of those cases, school officials responded by questioning the student, and only 21 percent reported the cases to the police.

Teachers with advanced degrees (beyond a bachelor’s degree) were 30 percent less likely to experience noncontact aggression, the researchers found, while special education teachers were 1.9 times more likely to experience it than teachers in general education subjects.

About half of the teachers (47 percent) who reported being the victims of theft or assault, experienced at least one kind of physical distress after victimization, such as headaches, trouble sleeping, changes in eating and drinking habits, upset stomach, fatigue, or muscle tension and back pain; while about 90 percent reported at least one type of emotional distress, including worry or anxiety, anger, depression, vulnerability, reduced trust in students and a feeling of not being safe.

The study found that teachers who thought the school or school district adequately handled their incident were more likely to have lower distress levels.

“The researchers concluded that the quality of school decision-making and treatment of teacher victimization reports correlates positively with a substantial increase in teachers’ satisfaction with schools’ responses,” the study said. “The study confirmed that teacher victimization remains a significant problem in our schools. The findings suggest that a school’s commitment to a procedural justice environment promotes better teacher victimization outcomes”

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