Can House Bill 6 Help Save Texas Classrooms?

After more than three decades in education, ATPE Member Kristin Shelton has witnessed sweeping changes in the classroom. Shelton recently retired from Round Rock ISD, where she spent 32 years working with young learners in Pre-K, kindergarten, first grade, and third grade. Minus one year spent overseas on an Air Force base in Japan, nearly her entire teaching life unfolded in Texas public schools.

Shelton says she didn’t walk away from the profession because of stagnant pay or overwhelming workloads. Those were known challenges she had long accepted. For her, the tipping point came from something more immediate and more emotionally draining: student behavior.

“Most of us know about the pay going in,” Shelton says. “What people don’t realize is the level of disruption teachers are facing daily. It’s the behavior issues.”

Disruptive student behavior, according to Shelton, is not just an occasional challenge. It has become a daily obstacle that derails lessons and drains teachers’ energy. In one of her final years in the classroom, she described a student whose repeated physical outbursts toward staff went unaddressed because administrators were too overwhelmed with even more severe cases.

In another instance, her principal had to call the police on a fifth grade student and ended up pressing charges after the child damaged school property and created a safety threat.

“My pre-K student hitting my classroom assistant doesn’t get any attention because our administrators are too busy dealing with kids who are destroying property and terrifying others,” Shelton says.

She emphasizes this is not a new issue but one that has steadily worsened over the past decade. The trend became especially intense in the years following COVID-related school closures. Shelton described a period, more recently, when classrooms were evacuated up to three times a week because of a single student’s outburst. These incidents did not only stop learning in its tracks, but also they created a climate of fear among other students who had to witness it and experience emotional stress on a regular basis.

“These disruptions don’t just affect the kid who is misbehaving,” she says. “They derail learning for an entire class and breed fear in their peers.”

Across the state in Lubbock, ATPE Member Allyson Haveman has seen similar patterns unfolding among older students. Haveman retired in June after 39 years in public education, including more than two decades as a campus administrator.

For the past 11 years, she has served as an assistant principal at Lubbock High School, where she was the administrator in charge of discipline documentation and one of two administrators who handled the majority of student discipline. Prior to that, she was the principal at the Lubbock County Juvenile Justice Center, a secure residential facility for youth with serious criminal records.

In Haveman’s view, student behavior in public schools has changed significantly over the years. What was once considered unacceptable has in some cases become normalized.

“There’s been a downward spiral in respect toward educators,” Haveman says. “Kids using profanity, fighting, vaping—it was constant. And there were only two of us administrators handling most of the discipline on campus.”

Haveman described multiple incidents where students returned to school days after committing serious offenses. In some cases, these were crimes involving violence or weapons, yet students were allowed to return before schools had a plan in place to manage the risks or respond to the disruption. Staff were left asking difficult questions with no clear answers.

“We’d have a kid commit a serious offense over the weekend and then show up again on Monday,” she says. “It was like, what exactly do you expect us to do?”

Haveman believes part of the problem stems from a cultural shift. During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers were widely celebrated as essential frontline workers. That period of appreciation, she said, quickly gave way to frustration and conflict as schools reopened. Students returned to class with new behavioral challenges, and staff found themselves confronting increased defiance and a lack of boundaries.

“It was like the gloves came off,” she says. “They brought in the tiny vapes; they fought in bathrooms. And it wasn’t every student, but it was enough to change the culture of the school.”

Both Shelton and Haveman see these incidents as more than just individual behavioral problems. They reflect a broader collapse in the systems meant to support both students and educators. Teachers are being asked to manage situations that would have once involved specialized staff, such as behavior interventionists, school psychologists, or trained counselors. Instead, they are left on their own, sometimes in classrooms where learning cannot safely or effectively continue.

“The other students see these things happening,” Shelton says. “And they wonder why nothing is being done. And honestly, so do we.”

Support Systems Eroded

In earlier years of her career, Shelton experienced what effective behavior support could look like in a school. At one time, her campus had a system in place that allowed for quick intervention when an incident began to escalate. An assistant principal, counselor, or behavioral aide could step into the classroom, assess the situation, and speak with the child privately outside the room. Sometimes there were designated desks or calming areas in the hallway where students could regroup with support staff. After de-escalating and talking through what had triggered the behavior, the student could return to class more in control. It was not perfect, but it worked.

“To me, that was the absolute best thing that could ever happen,” Shelton says. “We had people who built relationships with those students, who could help them regulate their emotions and then bring them back when they were ready. And the rest of the class didn’t have to lose instruction.”

Over time, however, those kinds of systems began to disappear. Shelton said the change was gradual. Aides and behavioral support staff were not replaced when they left. Counselors were spread thinner across multiple campuses. Administrators found themselves consumed with broader duties, including testing, compliance, and safety protocols. The result was fewer adults available to intervene in moments of crisis.

“Our one school counselor cannot possibly meet with all the kids who need counseling,” Shelton says. “She’s supposed to be helping with emotional and behavioral needs, but she also has to handle testing, scheduling, and all these other things. She’s just one person.”

Without this kind of structured backup, teachers are often left alone to manage situations that escalate beyond their training or control. When a student’s behavior reaches a breaking point, Shelton said the most common response is to evacuate the rest of the class. This removes the immediate danger to others, but it also creates an environment where disruption is rewarded with attention and the classroom is effectively handed over to the misbehaving child.