Out of the blue, the student balled his fists and punched his teacher in the face, pummeling her until she was dazed and crying, a police report says.

By the time a calm returned to Northeast High in Oakland Park, two teachers and an aide were in ambulances. The special needs student wasn’t arrested because he “cannot tell the difference between right and wrong behaviors,” a police sergeant wrote in his report.

Three days later, the teen was back on campus.

In school after school, students are erupting with violence. They stab or beat teachers. They throw furniture. They stalk and attack classmates, turning schoolrooms into danger zones where the rights of violent students with disabilities trump all others.

In an eight-month investigation, the South Florida Sun Sentinel found that a sweeping push for “inclusion” enables unstable children to attend regular classes even though school districts severely lack the support staff to manage them.

State and federal laws guarantee those students a spot in regular classrooms until they seriously harm or maim others. Even threatening to shoot classmates is not a lawful reason to expel the child.

Violent students have injured thousands of teachers, bus drivers and staff in Broward County alone and undoubtedly thousands more across Florida, records obtained by the Sun Sentinel show.

“It’s just a no-win scenario right now,” said attorney Julie Weatherly, of Mobile, Alabama, who advises school districts on the legal complexities of removing aggressive students when they have a disability. “Nobody wants a Parkland, of course. It’s this huge nightmare.”

‘The child comes back’

The federal law had a noble purpose when enacted more than four decades ago, long before the ranks of violent students swelled. It ensured that students with disabilities received an education in the same classrooms as their peers, a practice known as mainstreaming.

Florida went even further, requiring agreement from the parents, or a judge, before transferring a disabled child to a special-needs school with more therapeutic services and smaller class sizes.

The drawback today is that the law treats a student with a severe behavioral disorder the same as a harmless student with Down syndrome, ordering that they be educated in regular classrooms unless it’s proven impossible.

To understand how schools became targets of deadly threats and violence, the Sun Sentinel interviewed more than 50 teachers, parents and experts; examined state and national laws and policies; and reviewed thousands of pages of police reports and court records. The records included Florida’s new risk protection orders, created by the Legislature after the Parkland shooting to keep guns away from dangerous people. Most counties had never released the records before.

"Students with violent tendencies have more rights than the students that they endanger." — Broward schoolteacher

In only 18 months, more than 100 unstable and potentially dangerous students across Florida have threatened to kill their teachers, classmates or themselves, records from 10 major counties show. Nearly half of the youths had histories of mental disorders, and more than half had access to guns.

The Sun Sentinel also emailed teachers in the Broward public school system, the nation’s sixth-largest school district, asking them to talk privately, if necessary, about what is happening in their classrooms. Many did.

“Students with violent tendencies have more rights than the students that they endanger. Just ask Nikolas Cruz,” one schoolteacher told the Sun Sentinel.

The same laws that protect disabled students make it difficult for schools to remove a student like the profoundly disturbed Cruz, who was obsessed with hurting others before he killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland on Feb. 14, 2018.

Two members of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Public Safety Commission, Okaloosa County Sheriff Larry Ashley and Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, question Daniel Gohl, the chief academic officer for Broward County Public Schools, about mainstreaming.

“You cannot get the child out of the classroom,” former teacher Patrick Jovanov said. “You can get him out of the classroom for a day or two or three, but the child comes back.”

One West Broward High teacher had to get a restraining order against a student who attacked her ― and only then, she said, was he moved out of her classroom.

Teachers had mounds of evidence that Cruz was bent on violence, but it still took his teachers five months to transfer him from Westglades Middle School to the more therapeutic environment of Cross Creek School for emotionally and behaviorally disabled children, the Sun Sentinel found.

Broward teacher Betsy “Miss B” Budrewicz said the pendulum has swung too far, allowing the rights of the violent few to outweigh the others.

After the Parkland shooting, she was haunted by the thought of a student in one of her elementary classes several years ago.

He obsessed over a girl in class, staring at her, demanding her attention, tormenting her if she withheld it. Taken out of the classroom one day, the boy cried and screamed the little girl’s name over and over, throwing himself against the classroom door repeatedly, the teacher remembered.

The girl’s mother had no idea her daughter was being terrorized. Because of the student’s federally protected privacy rights, Budrewicz’s bosses cautioned her not to tell the mother — a warning she ultimately defied. The mom cried and thanked her and removed her daughter from the class the next day, she said.

Budrewicz believed the boy belonged in a special therapeutic school. He hit her and threatened to murder his classmates and to shoot the teacher’s aide.

She submitted five disciplinary referrals, flagging the child’s extreme behavior to school administrators, hoping to start the necessary documentation to move him. But the referrals went nowhere, she said.

“I tried to wave a flag,” she said. If something ends up happening, “I’m going to feel a little to blame.”

Clearing the classroom

Schools are dealing with more students labeled with behavioral conditions than ever, the Sun Sentinel found.

One in five adolescents has had a serious mental health disorder at some point in life, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

What is Oppositional Defiant Disorder Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Conduct Disorder Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Intermittent Explosive Disorder Emotional/behavioral Disability ? People with ODD act out more than others their age, exhibiting anger, refusing to follow instructions, seeking revenge, deliberately trying to bother others, blaming other people for their mistakes and losing their temper. ODD usually is evident before age 8. Commonly occurs with ADHD.

The case files of Florida’s most troubled kids show what they’re enduring as they head to school each day. One boy said he was living with his father in a neighbor’s shed. Another said his brother was found hanging from a tree.

Educators now believe that childhood trauma can trigger intense anxiety in kids, or “toxic stress” that can lead to mental illness.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, behavior problems, anxiety and depression are the most commonly diagnosed mental disorders in children, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states. The number of children diagnosed with ADHD has been on the rise over the past two decades. Of those, nearly two-thirds have been diagnosed with an additional mental, emotional or behavioral disorder, according to a 2016 CDC parent survey.

If a student with one or more disorders has a meltdown, teachers are limited in how they can react. They must interrupt everyone else’s education and evacuate the classroom while a disturbed student rages out of control.

Police respond to a student in Broward County who put two teachers and an aide in the hospital after a meltdown. The audio captured by the officer’s body camera is sometimes distorted.

Restraining or isolating a disorderly student is frowned upon and tracked by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

One student’s behavior plan, contained in a 2016 court order obtained by the Sun Sentinel, instructed teachers to clear the room “quickly and quietly so as not to give [the student] any attention.” The teachers were advised to protect valuables and “do not attempt to convince [the student] to follow the rules.”

The law does allow students to be transferred to schools that specialize in emotional and behavioral problems, but it is a final option after all else fails, the Sun Sentinel found.

Not all children can succeed in general education classrooms; educators know this, but the student can remain there for months while the documentation for removal is built.

First, the school must conduct a behavior assessment and create and use a behavior intervention plan. Then, according to the state Department of Education, the red tape unfolds:

“In addition, it would be expected that a student being considered for removal from a general education classroom would have been involved with a multi-tiered system of supports utilizing data-based planning and problem solving, matched to student learning needs. Review of interventions enacted, fidelity checks conducted and data obtained during the use of these supports should also be considered in any potential instructional and placement planning.”

For students with disabilities, any change in school must be agreed upon by a committee that includes the parents. Such students also can’t be disciplined like the general population, especially if the misbehavior is found to be an expression of the disability. Special education students can’t be suspended without schooling for more than 10 days a year.

Cruz was suspended as many as 18 times in one school year, according to a consultant’s report for the school system, but he was provided schooling on most of those days.

Months can pass while teachers fill out forms and accumulate data to justify a transfer to a special, therapeutic school: Did the student threaten to kill anyone today? Did the student disrupt class by screaming obscenities? Knock furniture over? Escape from the classroom without permission? Tear up a classmate’s homework? Shove someone in the hallway?

“Sometimes it’s a very long and arduous process to get a child placed where you need him to be,” said Beverly Slough, a school board member in St. Johns County in northern Florida. “It’s just a different world in teaching today. It’s hard, hard, hard work.”

Florida lawmakers made it even harder.

A 2013 law gave parents veto power over moving a child to a separate, therapeutic school. If the parent says no, the child can stay put while the district fights the parents in a state hearing.

In a 2016 Palm Beach County case, for example, a student with “poor anger control” who would kick and hit staff and peers was recommended for transfer to a special school with classes of three to eight students, with a behavior technician and aides. The parents didn’t agree.

Records in the case show that the student attacked and disrupted other students at public school for more than an entire school year before the district won approval for a permanent transfer.

In that time, the student, during one of many tantrums, overturned a table with attached benches, breaking a student’s leg.

Only then was the district able to remove the student from the school, and only for 45 days, under federal law.

The law allows such a move for students with a disability who bring a weapon to school or commit serious bodily injury, but lawyers fight over the meaning of “serious.” Most threats and assaults don’t qualify.

Middle school administrators discover a gun in a student's backpack. A young witness tearfully tells police what she heard.

A special-needs kid who threatens to shoot up a school, for example, commits no serious bodily injury in the eyes of the law, said Weatherly, the attorney.

Breaking another child’s nose did not qualify as serious bodily injury in the judgment of a Pennsylvania court, which said the Pocono Mountain School District in 2008 was not justified in removing the child to an alternative educational setting.

Judges have found that taking action requires extreme physical pain, obvious disfigurement or loss of limb, organ or mental faculties.

Florida legislators weren’t thinking of violent students when they passed the 2013 law, unanimously.

It was pushed by the wife and daughter of two powerful state lawmakers, both now out of office: Sen. Andy Gardiner of Orlando, who has a young son with Down syndrome, and Sen. John Thrasher, who has a grandchild with the syndrome.

Thrasher, who is now president of Florida State University, said he meant to empower parents, not to handcuff teachers and stop them from removing dangerous students. He said he would not oppose legislators’ re-examining the law.

“If someone thinks it’s blocking schools from removing violent, disruptive kids, then certainly, it ought to be looked at,” he said.

The first consideration for all parents, he noted, is the safety of their kids, “and rightly so.”

“Safety and learning go hand in hand,” he said.

At the same time, he said, children with disabilities are entitled to an education. They have a right to learn.

“My grandson is doing remarkably well,” Thrasher said.“He’s well-liked and loved by other kids at the school.”

Teachers victimized

Certainly, most disabled students are not a danger, but violence in the classroom has reached a new peak, in the view of Anna Fusco, president of the Broward Teachers Union.

Teachers with years of experience say they’ve never seen the kind of “meltdowns” they’re seeing now. No one’s sure what’s behind it: food additives, environmental toxins, violent video games, trauma?

Children with behavioral and emotional difficulties have been mainstreamed in general education for decades, Fusco noted. But only in recent years has violence become prevalent. Most of the time, but not always, she said, the violent student has “some type of label” under special education.

“The meltdowns are becoming extreme,” she said. “Now it’s total destruction of a classroom.”

Earlier this year, the Broward Teachers Union surveyed its members about school safety and released a disconcerting report, summarizing the anonymous responses of 1,884 educators.

Half said they had feared for their safety in the past year. Fifty-seven percent said violence disrupts the school day multiple times a day.

Inside the classrooms, teachers reported being stabbed with pencils or scissors. They’ve been struck with desks, chairs, fruit and water bottles. Students spit in their faces or mouths, or their coffee.

“I’ve had to clear my classroom multiple times because of dangerous situations to myself and the other students in the room,” one teacher wrote. “I spent my year trying to keep students from hurting others and disciplining, that I couldn’t get through a lesson. ... I spent my days writing daily notes, keeping data, and writing almost 40 [discipline] referrals. ... Students had to put up with the abuse of other kids. No child should have to come to school and deal with that. It makes me terribly sad.”

At one middle school, a child repeatedly “screams, yells, curses at teachers.” “She flips over desks. She took her long fingernails and scratched up a teacher’s face while pushing him in the doorway,” the survey states. “He wrote a report and submitted it to the police officer and administration. She got suspended for three days and returned to his classroom when he asked that she be removed permanently.”

Over a five-year period, Broward’s teachers, school bus drivers and other employees reported 3,914 injuries caused by students — or four per school day on average, according to data released by the school district in response to a public records request from the Sun Sentinel.

“Punched by student in the back of the head, near neck,” one claim states. “Complaints of visual disturbances, headache and neck pain.”

Employees reported being shoved, bitten, slapped and kicked.

One “acting out student” pushed an educator’s neck into a window ledge.

Educators told the Sun Sentinel that if they complain, their bosses sometimes blame them for not controlling the child.