On October 28 at Spring Valley High School in South Carolina, there was a controversial incident between a student and a school resource officer over the student refusing to put away her phone.

Numerous videos have surfaced of Sheriff Deputy Ben Fields appearing to assault the high school student. The confrontation began after a teacher repeatedly asked the student to put her phone away. After being unsuccessful, both the teacher and an administrator both had to ask the student to put her phone away.

After the student refused to give her phone to the teacher, a school resource officer was sent to the class to detain the student. The video shows the student, along with her desk, being violently thrown onto the ground and dragged across the room. The student was charged with disturbing the class and sent home.

So why doesn’t this happen at our school?

“Even though it may not be the perfect set of circumstances, the teachers have worked really hard to try and build relationships with kids,” English resource teacher Wendy Farmer said. At Watkins Mill High School, teachers work hard to make sure they build a strong and understanding relationship with their students.

When students feel they are not being attacked and are spoken to with respect, confrontations do not go too far. “The only time I wouldn’t listen is if they disrespected me,” sophomore Tamara White said. Students at WMHS respect their teachers when they are shown the respect back. This creates an effective and safe learning environment at the Mill.

When freshmen Janice Asabere was confronted by one of her teachers to put her phone away, she complied. “[The teacher] handled it right, she didn’t touch me or anything,” Asabere said.  “She just threatened to call my mom and that was enough. I knew she was going to give it back to me at the end of the day so I wasn’t really mad.”

“Had it been me [in the Spring Valley situation], I would have called security,” social studies teacher Sandy Young said. “If security wasn’t able to get the student to comply, I think security here would just have let it go, and dealt with the student at another time.”

Before a confrontation, like that, would have gotten physical, it would have been handled by many different officials in different departments. “There’s different layers: there’s the teacher and usually there’s security, then there’s [administration], then the officers. And also what we do here is we move the entire class to avoid that,” security team leader Darryl Cooper said.

“Most of our staff have very good relationships with students,” principal Carol Goddard said. When staff have good relationships with students, students are more willing to give up their phones when they are asked. These positive relationships at WMHS create mutual respect between students and staff, preventing violent reactions like those seen at Spring Valley last month.