Alabama teachers and lawmakers agree: Managing school discipline is tougher than ever, and schools want help managing unruly students.

Alabama lawmakers gave final passage to SB157, named the “Teachers’ Bill of Rights” Tuesday, with unanimous approval in both chambers. It now awaits Gov. Kay Ivey’s signature.

The Teachers’ Bill of Rights requires schools to take action against a student when the student disrupts class to the point that the teacher sends the child out of the classroom. Before the student can return to the teacher’s class, the principal must give written notification about what type of disciplinary action was taken.

“Right now we have a situation where we know that disruptive students in our classrooms are inhibiting our ability to get teachers in the classroom, to keep teachers, to recruit teachers,” Rep. Danny Garrett, R-Trussville said. “It’s impacting the learning of the other students.”

The Alabama Education Association pushed for the law, saying teachers and other education employees were regularly being physically and verbally abused in classrooms. The union says school officials too often took little action against disruptive students, if any.

“Teachers are at a breaking point,” AEA Executive Director Amy Marlowe said.

This bill, Marlowe said, requires a school to document each time students are sent out of the classroom, which some schools are reluctant to do.

School officials send a child back to class because they don’t want to dole out discipline because they then have to document it, Marlowe said. When schools document an incident, it becomes a part of the annual report, and if the school has a lot of incidents, she said, it will make it look like the school has a discipline problem.

Alabama releases yearly reports of student discipline, called the student incident report in June that documents all disciplinary incidents from fights to defiance to vandalism.

The total number of all reported incidents statewide during the 2022-23 school year was 258,000, up from 81,000 during the 2017-18 school year. According to the 2022-23 report, 87 employees statewide were victims of an incident during that school year. AL.com compiled school-specific incident reports from 2021-22, here.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle agreed that disruptive students are driving teachers out of the classroom and are taking learning time away from other students.

Garrett said teachers have little authority to ensure students are disciplined for disrupting class.

“The problem is that what happens too often,” Garrett said, “is that a student is asked to leave the classroom and to cool down and then ultimately is just told to go back into the classroom and the situation’s never resolved.”

Garrett also referenced a new due process bill, also awaiting signature, which adds due process rights for students during the school discipline process. Schools would still have to comply with that law as well as federal disability and civil rights laws.

AL.com has reviewed a document, compiled by the AEA, that describes incidents of students assaulting teachers. Stories include everything from getting a black eye from being head-butted by a student to being repeatedly subjected to students using derogatory profane language towards them to having students throw chairs at them and other students.

“I have to hear this conversation every single day from my wife because she deals with the discipline in her school,” Rep. Patrick Sellers, D-Pleasant Grove, said. “And I tell her everyday you need a resident butt-whooper in your school to handle discipline.”

Sellers’ comments drew cheers of agreement and applause from other House legislators.

Rep. Mary Moore, D-Birmingham, said she is concerned about what happens to students when they get expelled from school. “We expel them from the school to the street,” she said.

Beginning with the next school year, these are the behaviors specified in the law that students can be excluded from classrooms:

• Engage in disorderly conduct,
• Behave in a manner that obstructs the teaching or learning process of others in the classroom,
• Threatens, abuses, intimidates or attempts to intimidate an education employee or another student,
• Willfully disobeys an education employee, or
• Uses abusive or profane language directed at an education employee.

If a student is excluded from the classroom two times in one semester, principals are required to hold a conference with the student’s parents.

The state board of education will develop a model policy that local school boards can adopt to ensure the law is implemented properly.