After nearly 25 years working for the Saugus Union School District as a teacher, Lea Kogan said she simply couldn’t do it anymore.  Speaking at the district governing board’s regular meeting on Tuesday, Kogan said she took a leave of absence in 2021, and three years later, she’s still traumatized by how she was treated in the classroom.  “I can’t go back in the classroom knowing that who knows what kind of classroom or student I would get,” she said, “and I have no power to protect the rest of my students. I have no power to protect myself.”  Cogan was one of many teachers, most of whom are currently still teachers, who raised concerns Tuesday about student behavior, a trend they say is worsening since becoming a known issue to teachers prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Some of the issues brought up were teachers being physically hit — including having objects like scissors being thrown — and students being so disruptive that entire classrooms had to be evacuated while the one student was being attended to.  “Kindergarten should be a safe and stable environment for them to spend nearly seven hours of their day,” said Charity Woods, a teacher with the district since 1997. “Many students don’t have stability or security in their own homes, and we are their one place where they should not need to worry. Instead of an environment that fosters these ideas, many students are coming to school each day wondering if today will be the day that their classroom is evacuated, if an upset peer might throw a marker at their head or hurt their teacher, or a frustrated friend pushes them to the ground, or a friend of theirs ripping everything off the classroom walls, including their work.”  These issues, the teachers said, seem to stem from a state mandate to integrate special education students into the general education population for 40% of the school day. What happens, though, is the students categorized as having “mild to moderate” disabilities seem to be trending more toward “moderate,” said Michelle Joseph, in her 38th year teaching special education and her 30th year with the Saugus district.  “With ‘mild’ students being kept in the general education classrooms with resource specialist support, many of the students that we now have in mild-moderate classrooms not only have academic struggles, but also have social, emotional and behavioral struggles,” she said, adding that the current situation is not conducive to any of the students getting the education they need.  Ingrid Boydston, currently a kindergarten teacher in the district and the 1999 California Teacher of the Year when she taught sixth grade at Santa Clarita Elementary, said she wants to be as helpful as possible, but there’s only so much that can be done when there’s a full room of students who also need to be watched over.  “You’re in your classroom, and the child in the hallway has been screaming at the top of their lungs for over 20 minutes,” Boydston said, imagining she was one of her kindergarten students. “You don’t know why they’re screaming, why nobody is helping them, and if that’s going to be you one day. How do you feel about school now?  “Now imagine that you were the teacher, and you see that child with special needs that results in their wandering behaviors,” she continued. “You want to help that child, but there’s no way you can while simultaneously meeting all these kids’ needs.”  Superintendent Colleen Hawkins said a behavior council is being set up so that these issues and possible solutions can be discussed.  Board member Anna Griese, participating in the meeting via Zoom, said she knows teachers and parents — a large group of parents attended the meeting in anticipation of what was going to be said — have been waiting more than two years for this conversation to be had, and that she looks forward to what comes out of those council meetings.  The first meeting is likely not to occur until after the new year due to the upcoming holidays, according to Hawkins.  After hearing from the teachers and some parents during the public comment period, the board heard from Carolynne Beno, chief analyst with the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistant Team, an external state agency established in 1992 to help local education agencies comply with accountability standards.  Carolynne Beno (top left), chief analyst with FCMAT, speaks at Tuesday’s Saugus district governing board meeting on Nov. 19, 2024, as board members Matt Watson (bottom left) and Anna Griese (bottom right) listen in via Zoom. Tyler Wainfeld/The Signal. While the agency does help districts that may be struggling with finances, Beno spoke via Zoom on Tuesday to address a report that her team recently did outlining how the district is doing when it comes to being in line with state special education standards and mandates.  According to data collected by the California Department of Education, the district is roughly in line with the state and L.A. County in terms of the percentage of special education students.  Beno said she didn’t have data to say how the Saugus district compares to other Santa Clarita Valley elementary districts, but there were anecdotes she had heard about the Saugus district having one of the better special education programs, and some families choose to enroll their children in the district because of that reputation.  There were 1,412 special education students enrolled in the Saugus district at the end of the 2023-24 school year.  With that enrollment comes extra support via paraeducators, for which the district is actually in line with the state standard, according to Beno.  But parents and teachers say there actually aren’t enough of them, leading to some of the issues that were talked about.  Karla Ramos, a parent in the district, said extra volunteers are being asked to help in the afternoons on top of volunteers helping in the mornings. The afternoon help, she said, is so that the general education teachers can pull the special education students aside for their needed help.  While district officials said something clearly needs to be changed, nothing will happen overnight.  Boydston offered a few possible solutions, such as: offering safe spaces on campus for students to decompress so that the other students can continue learning; telling a student when their behavior isn’t appropriate, even if that goes against the current model of intervention support; having extra adults in classrooms; and shortening kindergarten days so that they aren’t in school for seven hours.  “I invite any board member to drop in on my classroom any time,” Boydston said. “I don’t want to know that you’re coming. I want you to see what it’s really like. I want you to feel what it’s like. So please try to stay for at least half a day. And thank you for letting me give my solutions, because I would really rather focus on fixing this than on the problem.”  The post Saugus district teachers voice concerns over student behavior  appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.