Earlier this month, the teachers union in Akron, Ohio, reached a deal with the district to avert a threatened strike. Lost in coverage of the deal was a peculiar sticking point that had held up the negotiations: Changing the definition of “assault” to replace the word “contact” with the word “injury.”
An assault committed by a student warrants consideration for expulsion. But district administrators were worried about students’ “exclusion from the education process,” and so, in an Orwellian turn, they’d proposed to solve the problem through redefinition. But union members opposed the proposal, and successfully fought to keep it out of the final deal.
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