Following the tragic death of a Harding High School student who was stabbed during a confrontation with a fellow classmate last month, public safety inside St. Paul schools has become a top issue.
Former Harding High School teacher Andrew Banker joined News Talk 830 WCCO’s Adam Carter to discuss his experience working at the school.
Starting at Harding in 2019, Banker worked there for nearly three years before he left at the end of last school year. While the first year of his time teaching occurred during distance learning, Banker spent 2021-2022 in the school, working with students and experiencing the community.
However, the change wasn’t like riding a bike, as Banker said that relationships with teachers and administration appeared to be fractured.
“It was that year that things started to crumble, and there was a lot of loss of trust, I think, as we were trying to make the difficult transition back to in-person learning,” Banker said.
One area that Banker says hurt the school was the breakdown in communication between the teachers and their superiors, especially as the year went on.
Recalling conversations he had at the end of last school year, Banker said teachers who had been with the school for decades said they hadn’t thought about leaving the school until that year.
Compounded on that, Banker says other issues arose when students began struggling with school, especially after losing almost a full year of learning.
Soon struggles began turning into public safety issues, and Banker says that those in the school would ask “which gun incident” you were talking about if they were asked about the 2021-2022 school year.
“After the first incident, I know that some other teachers tried to speak up and tried to create some change, and they also got shut down,” Banker said, noting there were three incidents in total.
Banker says that he began speaking up after the second incident, which saw a student holding another at gunpoint in a bathroom in the school. Even worse, the situation was recorded and quickly circulated online.
“It really hit me because that gun was held to that kid’s head for such a long time, and guns are such a split-second sort of decision. And so it was just extremely grave to me at the time seeing that,” Banker said, adding that several of his students didn’t show up the next day out of fear about what happened.
The situation ended as best it could with no one being injured, but Banker still felt the need to speak out on what had happened and call for change.
Wanting to know what his students were going through and to get a better idea of how they dealt with what was happening, Banker sent out a survey.
Among the responses, students shared that they felt unsafe in the school’s bathrooms, in some cases refusing to go during the day, as well as in the hallways.
Looking to put his responses to use and help benefit his students, Banker says he gave the results to the school administration. After he didn’t hear anything back, he started trying to organize teachers to put together a list of demands.
“That’s when I got flagged and put under investigation by the district,” Banker said, adding that the administration was “apparently not happy with it.”
Banker said he was investigated for his survey because they said he didn’t follow the correct process for surveying students; he spoke at a walkout, which was not allowed according to the district; and for the letter of directives that he was trying to compile, which had yet to be sent to any members of the administration and that his teacher’s union advised him to write.
While he first felt alone following his investigation and departure from the school, Banker said he now knows other teachers feel the same after some spoke out at this week’s listening session.
“There’s teachers all across the district at elementary, middle, and secondary schools that are trying to speak up,” Banker said.
