COLUMBUS, Ind. (WISH) — A local school district is releasing a first-of-its-kind report on employee injuries.

Indiana’s I-Team has been investigating teacher injuries since 2019. The investigation found a range of injuries, including teachers being hit, punched, kicked, bitten, headbutted, and having their hair pulled. Some suffered concussions.

As the I-Team has reported, Indiana is repealing a law that requires schools to publicly report when a student injures a school employee on the job.

Indiana schools previously tracked school employee injuries and annually reported the data to the Indiana Department of Education. The department compiled the numbers, broken down by school district, into a publicly available report.

Under a new law, House Enrolled Act 1249, schools will be required to report workplace battery incidents to the Indiana Department of Labor starting in July 2027. The new law does not require the Department of Labor to publicly report school employee injury data.

Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp. adopted a new policy that requires the district to track when a worker is injured by another person while on the job. The district recently released its first report under the policy, which revealed 319 total injury incidents from July 2025 to June 2026.

The report also found 18 instances where school employees missed work because of an injury.

Jason Major, a school board member in the Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp., authored the policy. He said it was designed to protect the district’s 2,000 employees.

“I think the significance of this report is it really is allowing us to have some full transparency of what the situation is in the classroom,” Major said. “I think it is going to really help drive conversation.”

At a July meeting, school board members and staff discussed the new data.

“The teachers are reporting and that is very important because we need to understand the reasons why a teacher is getting hit, punched, scratched, scraped, bit, hand slammed in the door so we can fix those issues,” Major said at the meeting.

Eighty-nine percent of reported injuries happened at the elementary level, while 11 percent occurred in middle or high school.

Laura Hack, director of elementary education at BCSC, said there are many reasons behind the numbers, including students with special needs and new students.

“It could be a new student who has come into our setting and classrooms and that may be bringing past experiences and past trauma,” Hack said at the meeting.

Many of the students involved in injury incidents are on an Individualized Education Program, or IEP.

Major said he was encouraged by the response to the report.

“We had a lot of discussion that we never had around this, because people saw numbers and they started to ask questions about how can we make it better, and that’s the whole goal,” Major said.

Last summer, an I-Team investigation introduced Melissa Streeval, a teacher who resigned from the Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp. after she said she was hurt on the job by students. She said both times, she was trying to stop a student from hurting other children on the playground.

“He was stomping on my feet, kicking my legs,” Streeval said. “The bottom half of my legs were completely red and swollen. I just couldn’t calm him.”

Streeval left the district because of safety concerns.

Major hopes this new report sends a message that the district takes the issue seriously.

“It’s wonderful that all the employees are putting the reports in,” Major said. “That’ll help us then take the next step, which is start to identify how we make improvements.”

The last state report on school employee injuries is scheduled for release next month.

• Indiana School Employee Injury Report

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