Can Teachers Remove Disruptive Students? Georgia, Iowa, and the Law Nobody Uses

00:00:00 – Leah Cleary

I was in my early twenties, and it was my very first year of teaching. I was on a provisional certificate, so I didn’t have a teaching certificate yet.

I had taken over some high school classes at a very troubled school, where the previous teacher had been fired. Those classes had been neglected. I mean, neglected to the point of not being able to function. They had been allowed to do whatever they wanted, and it was a lot of work to get them where they needed to be.

There was one student, actually, that I had built a relationship with. I liked him, and one day he came at me to hit me. Other students held him back.

I was so upset that I took a sick day the next day. I still think that was the right call because of where my mind was. But his mom brought him to the school that next day to apologize to me, and I wasn’t there for that. To tell you the truth, I still feel a little bad about that.

I don’t think this was a bad kid. Now, what he did was wrong. I think he was really impulsive, and maybe he had some anger that he needed help managing. And I think his mom was trying to guide him toward doing the right thing. She ended up pulling him out of our school and enrolling him elsewhere.

But before any of that happened, I thought about doing something most teachers in Georgia never actually do. I thought about using the law that lets a teacher remove a student from her classroom, because I didn’t feel safe.

00:02:22 – Leah Cleary

It’s time for your monthly Teacher Reality Check, where we translate education policy jargon into what it actually means for those of us still in the classroom.

Today we’re talking about teacher-initiated student removal laws. Georgia has one. Iowa just passed a much stronger one, and we’re going to want to keep our eyes on that one. Other states are moving in the same direction.

The question I keep coming back to is this: if classrooms have gotten this hard, and they have, why does almost nobody use the law?

Let’s start here in Georgia. This law is not new. It’s been on the books since 1999. Under Georgia law, a teacher can remove a student from class if that student’s behavior repeatedly or substantially interferes with the teacher’s ability to teach or with other students’ ability to learn, or if the student poses an immediate threat to safety. Like my student in the story I told you when we first started.

But here’s the part a lot of teachers don’t know. The teacher can refuse to let that student come back. When that happens, the decision goes to the school’s placement review committee.

Now, this is in Georgia. That committee is two teachers chosen by the faculty and one staff member chosen by the principal. The teacher who removed the student cannot serve on it. Obviously. The committee has to meet by the end of the second school day and put its decision in writing by the end of the third.

Now, I want to bust a myth here, because I’ve heard this one for many, many years teaching in Georgia. A lot of Georgia teachers think you only get to do this twice in your whole career. That’s not the case. That’s not what the law says at all.

What the law says is this: if a teacher removes more than two students in a single school year, and the committee sends those students back because returning them is the best available alternative, that teacher may be required to complete professional development in classroom management.

So it’s not two per career like a lot of teachers think. It’s not even a cap. It’s a trigger for professional development.

00:04:57 – Leah Cleary

But think about what that trigger communicates. If you use this law and it doesn’t go your way, the assumption is that you’re the one who needs help. Think about that for a minute, because I think that’s the whole ball game, and we’re going to come back to it.

Here’s what that looks like in real life. I’ve been teaching for 26 years, and in that time I’ve considered using this law once. That was the story I just told you. And I’ve seen it carried out at a teacher’s insistence exactly once in 26 years.

I’ve seen plenty of students sent to alternative school, but that’s generally an administrative decision. And I’ve seen parents request that their child be moved to a different teacher’s class far more often than I’ve ever seen a teacher initiate student removal.

So I went looking for the data, of course. I mean, how often do Georgia teachers actually use this law? How often do committees send students back against the teacher’s wishes? I couldn’t find that data. Help me out if you know where to find it.

The state tracks discipline incidents and consequences, but not who started the removal. So we have a law that’s been around for more than 25 years, and we have no way of knowing whether it works. That is an implementation question all by itself.

Now, the one time I saw a teacher use it. I’m going to keep this vague on purpose to protect everyone involved. A colleague of mine caught a student cheating. Instead of just giving a zero, he was very generous and let the student retake the test, and the student covered the paper with really hateful remarks.

My colleague wanted that student removed from his class, and I supported him. That behavior made him feel unsafe, and other students in the room felt unsafe. And this student was antagonizing and terrorizing everybody. That is exactly the kind of situation this law was written for.

00:07:18 – Leah Cleary

So now let’s turn to Iowa, because this is the brand new law, and Iowa just did something different that we’re going to want to watch.

Iowa’s Senate File 2428 was signed by Governor Kim Reynolds this summer and took effect July 1, 2026. It passed the Iowa Senate 45 to 0. Not a single no.

Iowa splits classroom disruptions into two kinds. The first is nonviolent. That’s things like disorderly conduct, profane or abusive language, bullying, and repeated disruption. For those, a teacher can remove the student for at least 30 minutes, and the student goes under the principal’s supervision.

In middle and high school, the student stays out of that class until at least the next school day. And if it keeps happening, a team that includes the teacher, the principal, a counselor, the parents, and the student has to sit down and build a behavior plan.

The second kind is violent. That’s causing injury, damaging property, or assault. For those, removal is not optional. The teacher is required to remove the student, and the principal has to impose a suspension, an expulsion, or an alternative placement.

Iowa also has a review committee, a lot like ours in Georgia. Two teachers chosen by the teachers in the building, plus an administrator, and behavioral or mental health professionals can also take part. For nonviolent disruptions, that committee can decide the student comes back.

But here’s the difference. If the student assaulted the teacher, and the teacher doesn’t consent to the student returning, the committee cannot make that student come back. Period. That’s the teeth of that law.

And I want to say really quickly that even with my student’s situation, I would have had to have proved everything in arbitration. He might have ended up back if the mother did not take care of the situation herself.

But back to Iowa. The school administrators told districts that when there’s uncertainty about whether a disruption counts, they should lean toward the teacher’s initial interpretation. Think about that. The default is trusting the teacher. We are not used to that as teachers, are we?

The law also says removed students have to make up the work they missed. It keeps protections for students with IEPs and 504 plans in place, including a quick IEP team meeting. And it sets up a pilot program for behavioral support centers in one rural district and one urban district in Iowa.

When the bill was moving through the legislature, teachers across Iowa told reporters that violent and disruptive students were getting harder to handle. And one of the lawmakers said it protects teachers from retaliation, and it requires the principal to step in before a student goes back to class.

So I asked myself, would Iowa’s law have changed what I did in my first year as a teacher? To tell you the truth, I don’t think so. I think I still would have hesitated, not just because I liked the kid. He was wrong. But because his mom took action.

If a parent’s willing to step up, I’m going to defer to her. She took him out of school. She enrolled him elsewhere. She was mortified by what had happened.

But I’m one teacher with one story. And Iowa, well, Iowa is not alone. There are other states doing this, too.

00:11:39 – Leah Cleary

Texas changed its law for the 2025-2026 school year so that teachers can remove a student for a single instance of disruptive, unruly, or abusive behavior. Before that, it took repeated or serious interference.

West Virginia passed a law in 2025 giving elementary teachers the authority to immediately remove students for violent, threatening, or intimidating behavior, or behavior that keeps other kids from learning, which we all know can be a problem. But fewer than half of West Virginia’s counties even have an elementary alternative program to send those students to.

Research from 2023 found that at least 40 states already allowed schools to exclude students for defiant or disruptive behavior in some form. And in April 2025, a federal executive order repealed earlier guidance that encouraged schools to address racial disparities in discipline. Since then, states have been way more active on this.

I want to make sure that I’m really clear about this, too. I’m incredibly aware of the school-to-prison pipeline. There are genuine disparities along racial lines when it comes to school discipline. I am not denying that for one second. It is a problem.

When Texas passed its law, disability rights advocates and education equity groups criticized it for leaning on punishment over intervention, and for how it could hit Black, Latino, and disabled students harder. Those concerns are one thousand percent legitimate, and they deserve to be taken seriously.

But that’s not the only thing at play here. Something else is also true. It’s gotten harder. And we want to keep teachers, and we want to empower teachers, not blame them for things that are out of their control and then treat them like they’re bad at their job when a student misbehaves repeatedly. So let’s talk about that.

00:13:54 – Leah Cleary

I’m working on a blog post about this right now, and it has taken me kind of a long time, partially because it’s the new school year and I’m starting at a new school in a new subject, and partly because I’ve been doing a lot of research and just getting bogged down in this one.

This post that’s going to come out in a few weeks is about how behavior has gotten worse, and how it is not your imagination, teachers. I’ll link to it in the show notes when it’s up. But here’s a little bit of what I’ve learned from the research so far.

In a national survey of more than 5,800 teachers last fall, Education Week found that 37 percent said student behavior got worse over the past school year, and another 34 percent said it got a lot worse. The research found that 58 percent of teachers deal with behavior problems every single day. And when RAND asked teachers what the most stressful part of the job is, the most common answer was managing student behavior.

And it’s not just phones. Researchers writing for Brookings pointed out that smartphones were everywhere before the pandemic, but the downward trend in teachers’ working conditions didn’t turn sharply until after 2019.

Classroom management has become more difficult over the past few years. There’s no question about that. Social media, technology, all of it. And parents who actively support teachers and schools tend to be the exception now. A very, very appreciated exception.

In that same Education Week survey, more than half of teachers said they wanted limits on parents undermining consequences, like pulling a kid out of school on detention day. I’ve even had parents take kids fishing when they got suspended.

But here’s where I land. When you have structure in your classroom, and you’ve built good relationships, and there’s still a student disrupting the class to the point that nobody can learn, that’s not a classroom management issue. Calling it a classroom management issue is blaming the teacher for something that is not their fault.

And it’s really, really unfair to expect teachers to change the way kids behave at school when they’re allowed to behave that way everywhere else. And in a lot of cases, it’s accepted.

I think that blame is one of the biggest reasons teachers are so stinking reluctant to use this law, even in cases where it probably should be used. If a kid is a safety risk, if a kid is so disruptive that other students can’t learn, asking for help in those moments shouldn’t come with a side dish of “maybe you just need to work on your classroom management. Here’s a book to read. Here’s professional development.”

Now, I’m fortunate. I have support at my school, but I think a lot of teachers feel like they don’t. And I think that feeling is a reason why people leave. The teacher attrition rate is atrociously high. We are having a hard time keeping teachers, and we need to take this very seriously.

I mean, just imagine being verbally abused, and in some cases physically assaulted, by a student when all you’re trying to do is teach them math or science or reading, and then being blamed for it. That is a huge problem.

And that makes me wonder about Iowa. Is this law, at least in part, a teacher retention effort? I wonder, because we are having such a hard time holding on to teachers right now. Nobody put that label on it. But when a state tells teachers, if a student assaults you, you get the final say on whether that student comes back, that sounds a lot like a state trying to keep its teachers.

00:18:10 – Leah Cleary

So here’s what I want you to take away from this episode, especially if you teach in Georgia, or one of the states with one of these laws that maybe isn’t as strict as Iowa’s.

You do have this ability. It’s in the law, and you don’t need to let anyone shame you if you need to use it. You are doing it for yourself, and you are doing it for the other students in your classroom.

And I’m not saying to use it arbitrarily. It should not be your first line of action. Make sure you have a good reason. Use progressive discipline. Most of us do. Try other things first.

But if you’ve done that, and a student is still refusing to cooperate, still keeping you from teaching, still creating an unsafe environment, or keeping other students from learning, that, my friends, needs to be addressed, and you should not be afraid to address it. Because if you look at the research right now, behavior has gotten worse. That’s not a you problem.

I’ve always been very reluctant to say “kids these days,” and to be honest, most of our kids these days are really, really good. But we do have a minority that are making this job very difficult. They’re making it difficult for teachers to teach. They’re making it difficult for other students to learn. And that needs to be addressed without putting the responsibility for their actions on the teacher.

And I want us to keep an eye on Iowa. Let’s watch what comes from this law, whether it’s funded and supported the way it needs to be, and whether it spreads to other states. Maybe even ours.

That’s your Teacher Reality Check for this month. You take care of yourselves out there, and I’ll see you next week.