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Teachers are asking for more help from police to handle students who act up in class, as they abandon a suggestion to establish "timeout rooms" in high schools for troublemakers.
A new disruptive students paper by the Post Primary Teachers Association's Hutt Valley region showed teachers faced verbal abuse, physical attacks in class and had students turn up with weapons or high on drugs.
A survey, released at this week's PPTA conference, found almost one in 10 teachers surveyed were frightened of students with severe behaviour problems.
Hutt Valley region executive member Martin Henry said delegates yesterday voted to pressure the Government to call a conference where teachers, police, Child Youth and Family and other groups could work directly together.
"It's not just teachers that are going to solve this problem - there's a whole lot of societal factors that come in as well," said Mr Henry. "These students don't come to schools without a whole lot of issues."
He said the earlier suggestion to push for timeout rooms in secondary schools as a place to send problem students in the heat of the moment was yesterday withdrawn.
"They were looking at the room and it's not the room that's the important thing - it's what you do with the kids," said Mr Henry.
Members also voted to push ahead with a controversial plan for the PPTA to work to amend legislation to allow information sharing about students with a history of high-risk behavioural problems that may put members of a school at risk.
Mr Henry said teachers were frustrated to discover new students had behaviour problems they were not warned about because of privacy laws.
"It's not about blacklisting kids or schools, it's about doing better things for them."
