Quote Originally Posted by thir View Post
if you have been suitable educated to handle these situations, and if there is staff enough to deal with them.
And that, I'm guessing, is the root of the problem. One of the many consequences of the long-running American belief that anything done by the government is a waste of money (except wars) is that public education has been run into the ground, with teachers trained on the cheap who are only doing such a badly paid and unpopular job because they can't get another one.

(I learnt the background here from my oldest son, who is teaching in the US because it was a job he could walk into with a British diploma. US schools will hire anyone with a teaching qualification from another country, because they are so much better trained than the American ones.)

Naturally this goes double for special needs teaching, because properly done it costs more money than the usual kind, but the parents are too few to be a voting bloc, so it gets less. The only thing teachers are expected to do is keep the kids from doing anything that might open the school to a lawsuit. With that as the top priority, naturally they hand it off to hospitals or the police, or anyone else they can, whenever it gets difficult.