Modesto TK-2 teachers report increased violence, disruption from students

More than 20 teachers and paraprofessionals showed up at the Modesto City Schools Board of Education meeting on Monday to address an increase in disruptive and violent behavior from students in transitional kindergarten through second grade. They complained of a lack of disciplinary measures by school administrators.

Lisbeth Perez, a paraprofessional of eight years in the district, said she has a student who sometimes leaves the classroom without permission or supervision for more than five hours a day, leaving Perez and other school staff to try and find him. The child was given Legos to play with when sent to the office for disciplinary action, she said.

“The same student has hit me, has punched me, has hit me with sticks, with his bare arms, legs. [With] no suspension, no behavior consequence, [he] is able to return back,” she said.

“Our students don’t feel safe. I had a parent one day that I was absent that told me his son was not feeling like coming to school the next day. He was afraid and I mentioned, ‘How can you say such a thing? School is beautiful. We learn, we make friends, relationships.’ The student was scared because there’s one student that had destroyed his classroom,” she continued.

After hearing from the Modesto Teachers Association at the last school board meeting that educators were facing this issue, the district brought it forward as an agenda item Monday to hear from district staff and teachers about the extent of the problem. Teachers reported students stabbing their peers or paraprofessionals with pencils, kicking and punching students and staff, flipping over desks and more.

The educators’ issues are with how their schools discipline children and the challenge of providing extensive care for one student while handling a class of sometimes upward of 30 students.

According to the district, the primary behavioral issues include children leaving the classroom without permission or supervision (also called elopement), profanity and aggression — in some cases, to the degree of wrecking classrooms.

Elopement specifically cannot legally be met with suspensions, according to Senior Director of Child Welfare and Attendance David Houck. “Elopement does fall under [Education Code] 48-900K. Elopement will not result in a suspension in Modesto City Schools. So, we’re going to have to come up with alternative means,” he said.

Houck also gave a presentation on state law changes on how schools can discipline students. He said that previously, the district had a zero-tolerance policy for behavioral issues, but that led to disproportionate suspension and expulsion rates for students of color and students with disabilities.

Twenty years ago, the district consulted with experts from the University of California to redress the issue.

The state, also concerned with inequities in disciplinary measures, passed an education code ban in 2013 on suspensions of K-3 students on the basis of willful defiance.

By 2023, the ban extended to all K-12 students. It also eliminated recess restrictions as a form of punishment. But according to the Urban Institute, the suspension ban has done little to address the inequities it was meant to.

“Before the ban implementation, Black and AIAN [American Indian and Alaskan Native] students experienced a more rapid decline in suspensions and then saw an increase in suspensions immediately following the policy change,” the website states. “Disparities for those with IEPs [Individualized Education Programs] and for those experiencing socioeconomic disadvantage followed similar trends.”

California encouraged schools to develop alternative disciplinary measures that didn’t result in the school-to-prison pipeline whereby harsh punitive policies funnel predominantly marginalized students into carceral systems. The effort, with a lack of transparency on what those alternative measures are, has largely led to the onus of disciplinary action on individual teachers.

Following the return to in-person learning after the COVID-19 pandemic, behavioral issues worsened in schools as educators contended with the consequences of children missing socioemotional milestones.

Teachers across America reported an increase in classroom disruptions. The National Education Association publicized a survey done by the University of Missouri that shows, “teacher working conditions have declined significantly since the pandemic, especially around key indicators of safety, student disruptiveness, and trust among teachers, parents, and administrators.”

MCS Trustee Abel Maestas noted the same during the meeting: “This is not a Modesto City Schools issue … across the country, the behaviors, they’ve increased.”

The district said it has invested in restorative justice practices, increased the number of hired student assistant specialists from 20 in 2021 to 70 now, and mental health clinicians from 12 two years ago to 29 now. It also added family support specialists, though did not provide numbers, and created intervention centers for seventh- through 12th-graders and more.

‘Our kids are being traumatized ...’

The teachers’ complaints were not with the district’s interventions, however, but with how school administrators reward or ignore bad behavior and a lack of consistency in discipline.

Everett Elementary School second-grade teacher Juli Smith said students have stabbed other students with pencils multiple times, with a recent incident concluding with an administrator saying, “Well, just don’t make those pencils accessible in your classroom.”

Smith also shared an incident from earlier that day that another teacher went through. “Today there was a dispute during tetherball and a kid punched another kid in the face. Yard duty saw it, called admin for help. A VP came out, talked to the kiddo, said, ‘Don’t do it again,’ and let him continue on with recess.”

She said that after the student continued to cause disturbances in the classroom, the teacher demanded a suspension. “It took 45 minutes for him to be removed from that classroom. And again, only happened because the teacher invoked her right for suspension,” Smith continued. “Our kids are being traumatized by it. They can’t learn when they don’t feel safe. And they don’t feel safe at school.”

Natalie Perez, an MCS program specialist who works on a team to address student behavioral and mental health needs, offered a few solutions for the issues teachers and instructors are facing. They include additional training on addressing student behaviors, alternative discipline plans that can be implemented districtwide, dedicated behavioral intervention spaces at the elementary school sites and more.

“The data shows that discipline in schools has historically and disproportionately affected students from marginalized communities the most. We know that suspensions and expulsions aren’t necessarily the answer, but neither is the state we’re in right now,” Natalie Perez said. “Preventative and intervention services are a long-term solution that are currently being used as a band-aid fix for student behavior.”

Trustee blames state lawmakers

Trustee Jolene Daly expressed concern that sending a child off to play with building blocks positively reinforces bad behavior. She added that lawmakers are to blame for the crisis of student behavior.

“It sounds like our state representatives are the ones that have messed up. It sounds like the state representatives, our Assembly people and our Senate people, Juan Alanis, specifically, and Maria Alvarado-Gil for our area and our governor, Gavin Newsom, need to come down here and sit in these classrooms or go to Sacramento and sit in the classrooms with them,” Daly said. “This is absolutely outrageous and I am completely disgusted that we’re seeing this and this has been happening for who knows how long.”

Board Chairman Abel Maestas said that advocating with representatives should involve asking for better funding and resources to create smaller classroom sizes and more staffing, and better implement the state’s vision of eliminating the school-to-prison pipeline. He added to be wary of replicating disciplinary measures that would enact that very system, harming Black and Latino students.

“I do want us to recognize that we don’t want to go backwards and still go back and create this school-to-prison pipeline that we know existed, especially for our Black and our Latino students,” Maestas said.

Superintendent says trust must be built between district, teachers

Maestas and Superintendent Vanessa Buitrago both recognized a culture of distrust where teachers, dealing with a prolonged issue, feel their only avenue for a solution is to speak during a board meeting. Buitrago said trust needed to be built between the district and its educators to collaborate on solutions, including disciplinary measures outside of suspensions, moving forward.

“The behaviors that we’re talking about didn’t just pop up out of nowhere. And the frustration that we’re hearing tonight is, quite frankly, not new,” Buitrago said. “I want us to be able to talk regularly and collaborate and find solutions together on a regular basis. But I also think that for that to happen, there needs to be a ton of trust … And that just doesn’t exist. I mean, the fact that it took this long for people to show up and talk about this makes me wonder why were we not able to talk about these concerns sooner?”

Maestas and Buitrago both also said that parents and families need to be involved in addressing this issue. Buitrago said she’s been in contact with third-party organizations that can work with families to help prepare children the summer before they start school, to create a smoother transition.

“We need to find a way to leverage families differently and engage them differently and I stand by that. And I don’t know what that looks like, but I know that we need to explore or experiment with what those relationships could look like,” Buitrago added.

This story was originally published October 23, 2025 at 3:45 PM.