The following opinion was submitted by the Bermuda Union of Teachers

A few weeks ago, we argued that when school-level discipline can be overturned from above, three things happen: teachers step back, students learn rules are negotiable, and the distance between the schoolyard and the streets gets shorter. That was not a hypothetical; it was a description of a mechanism.

That mechanism has now played out publicly. This is not simply an “internal process”, as the ministry has described it. A school closed three weeks after a sports-day dispute. And the ministry continues to suggest that public concern reflects a “misunderstanding” of the minister’s legal responsibilities.

The deeper problem is that this is no longer a single incident. Port Royal is now a case study in what happens when disciplinary authority becomes vulnerable to political intervention.

Across the system, teachers and principals have lost confidence that consequences will stand. The Code of Conduct remains unchanged on paper, but every educator in Bermuda has now watched a school-level disciplinary decision reversed under ministerial pressure while a teacher involved was placed on leave.

Educators are responding rationally. They are stepping back, writing fewer referrals, and absorbing behaviour that should not be absorbed because the cost of acting now appears greater than the cost of inaction.

Children notice this immediately. When one student’s consequence can be reversed by a phone call, every child in that building learns the same lesson: rules are negotiable if the right adult intervenes.

Parents have learnt the lesson too. The department’s own procedures state that complaints should first go through the principal. Yet parents are increasingly bypassing schools and contacting the Department of Education directly because they have seen that higher-level intervention may overturn school-level decisions. This is not irrational behaviour by parents. It is a rational response to the signal the system itself sent last month.

Most corrosive of all is the appearance that some parents are heard, while others are redirected.

One family reportedly received ministerial intervention within hours. A larger group of parents from the same school, concerned about the fallout of that intervention, have reportedly been redirected back to the principal.

The ministry’s own 2018 Ministerial Code warns ministers to avoid not only actual conflicts, but the appearance of conflicts. The public is therefore entitled to ask a straightforward question: why are some parents heard directly, while others are redirected back down the chain?

Public education depends on equal treatment. The moment one parent can access ministerial intervention while another cannot, the system begins to resemble a network of influence rather than a public service.

This issue also cannot be separated from the broader behavioural crisis unfolding across schools.

A child who repeatedly disrupts a classroom without meaningful intervention is not being supported. They are being abandoned, alongside their classmates and teacher. There is no child-centred philosophy that requires 16 children to have their education compromised so one child can avoid a consequence.

The Code of Conduct already provides for graduated consequences so problems can be addressed before they escalate. When those consequences are routinely undermined, the only remaining tool teachers have is endurance.

Meanwhile, many alternative-education pathways for high-needs students remain inaccessible or blocked by bureaucracy. Requests for support are delayed, while meaningful alternatives remain limited.

The consequences are increasingly visible, even in Bermuda’s preschools. Teachers and principals report children as young as three hitting staff, hitting one another and verbally abusing adults.

Several years ago, the DoE removed regular behaviour therapist support from preschools. A child who was three years old when those therapists were removed is now in primary school. A child who was three last year remains in preschool today, often without specialist behavioural support and supervised by educators who were never trained to function as behaviour analysts.

Every credible framework in child development identifies the early years as the period when intervention is most effective. Bermuda removed specialists from precisely that stage. The effects are now being felt by teachers, classmates, and families whose children might have been redirected earlier had support existed when it mattered most.

At the same time, teachers increasingly find themselves exposed without institutional backing.

Following reported incidents at CedarBridge Academy and Sandys Secondary Middle School in 2025, the ministry launched a system-wide safety review. Yet many educators say their daily experience remains one of exposure without protection.

A teacher who intervenes in a fight risks administrative leave. A teacher who enforces the Code of Conduct risks administrative leave. A teacher struck by a student may receive sympathy or inclusion in a safety review, but little confidence that conditions will materially improve.

No workforce can sustain that indefinitely. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the signal being sent is that the employer’s duty of care applies to everyone in the building except the teacher.

The result is exactly what many educators warned would happen: burnout, attrition, and a workforce learning in real time that the safest professional option is often not to intervene at all. Meanwhile, some of our youngest, best and brightest educators opt to seek roles in private schools where, when behaviour concerns arise, the student causing the concern, and their family, is asked to not return.

The final, and perhaps most troubling layer of this story is that many of the officials who shaped the current system are now leaving it.

Senior leaders, principals, and deputies are retiring or resigning. Meanwhile, local transformation school change agents have not had their contracts renewed; and the overseas consultants, who were paid millions to help design education reform, departed in December 2025.

The decisions that shaped the present situation — removing preschool behaviour therapists, weakening alternative pathways, allowing procedural drift around discipline, and reducing specialist supports — were made over many years, by DoE officials; several of whom may no longer be in post by autumn, 2026. That matters because accountability often leaves with the people who made the decisions.

Meanwhile, those remaining inherit a system with reduced institutional memory and fewer supports. Recent budget reductions cut paraprofessional funding, autism-unit funding and staffing levels while reducing the budget of the renamed Education Reform Unit.

Three weeks ago, we argued that the cost of overturning school-level discipline would eventually be paid by teachers, students, and the public. Bermuda is now paying that cost.

A school closed its doors. A teacher remains on leave. Parents are divided between those granted direct access and those redirected back through procedure. School staff report escalating behavioural problems. Department leadership is departing. And the Ministry continues to describe public concern as a “misunderstanding”. This is not — nor has it ever been — good enough.