Thousands of Indiana teachers, school staff injured by students, new state report reveals

Updated Wednesday, Sept. 11, 2024

Thousands of teachers and other school workers were hurt by students on the job, a new report quietly released by Indiana's education department reveals. 

It’s the first report since state lawmakers pushed for more transparency surrounding student-on-teacher harm in the classroom.

But roughly less than half of Indiana’s school districts appear in the report. It’s unclear if hundreds of district and charter schools failed to report data or had none to submit.

A 2023 law requires public schools to track the number of injuries caused by a student and then report those findings to the state’s Department of Education. The department is tasked with maintaining a public data report about these incidents. 

Schools must share injuries with the department if: it's required to be reported to worker’s compensation; causes an employee to miss all or part of one work day; and/or if the injury falls under the public school’s reporting policy. 

In total, more than 3,032 unique injuries during 2023-2024 were reported to the education department across these classifications. 

Education Secretary Katie Jenner said any teacher injuries are unacceptable to her.

“Our teachers go in every single day to serve students, to serve Indiana to try to make it better so any teacher injury is not acceptable anywhere,” Jenner said.

The same injury can appear on the report in more than one category. The "Indiana School Employee Injury Report" shows about 2,770 injuries were reported per the school’s policy and about 1,940 incidents were declared for worker’s compensation. And 485 incidents resulted in employees taking one or part of a single work day.

Schools that reported one or more injuries are on the list. But some districts and charter schools are noticeably missing.

The Department of Education did not respond to a question from WFYI about whether absent schools were due to non-compliance or had no incidents to report. 

Indianapolis Public Schools spokesman Marc Ransford said the district did not submit injury data on time due to a technical glitch. However, they plan to soon report 90 incidents that took place on their campuses during the 2023-24 school year. 

“We are working diligently to resolve that issue and expect to have the report submitted shortly,” Ransford said in an email.

Of Indiana’s 291 public school districts, only 110 reported at least one incident to the education department.

There were even fewer charter schools. Just 16 of more than 100 charter schools reported this data, WFYI found. WFYI compared the state’s school directory to the list of districts and schools that reported, excluding service centers, school co-ops and state run schools. 

Jenner said state leaders but also local districts should be asking questions about how frequently and consistently these injuries are happening. The data should guide urgent improvement, she said.

“Now we have to take that and work to understand why is it happening in some places more than others and make sure we are urgently improving,” Jenner said.

Schools reported the injury data for last school year in IDOE’s data exchange until July 15. There’s no penalty for school districts who don’t comply with these requirements. 

The report does not identify the injured employee or the student.

Indiana’s largest teachers union advocated for this data requirement to “give teachers and other school personnel confidence that they are working in a safe environment.”

Keith Gambill, president of the Indiana State Teachers Association, said this data helped quantify what educators were sharing with the union but the next step is addressing the problem. 

“The process of collecting the data is important, but where we really need to then begin to focus is, what can we do to help drive that number down?”

Here are school districts that reported the highest number of incidents during the 2023-2024 school year:

• 149 incidents at Evansville Vanderburgh Schools

• 142 incidents at Bartholomew Consolidated Schools

• 127 incidents at Fort Wayne Community Schools

• 122 incidents at Porter County Education Services

• 119 incidents at Vigo County Schools

• 107 incidents at Elkhart Community Schools

The report does not identify the injured employee or the student.
 

Note: The story was updated Wednesday, Sept. 11, 2024 with comments from Education Secretary Katie Jenner.

Rachel Fradette is the WFYI Statehouse education reporter. Contact Rachel at rfradette@wfyi.org.