On October 3rd, community members met at Bay View Middle and High School to discuss how to improve the school. School officials outlined the successes and modifications to the school program, principally the Springboard college prep program coming to Bay View.
Then the discussion turned the safety. A retired high school teacher stood up and demanded that the superintendent “unshackle” the school principals and allow them to suspend out-of-control students. According to this retiree, the superintendent seems to only care about getting the suspension numbers down, and low suspension numbers don’t mean that the schools are safe and under control.
Yes, Superintendent Thornton has made it a priority to lower the suspension rate. For years Milwaukee Public Schools has used suspensions as its primary discipline procedure. We even suspended students for truancy.
I explained to the audience at Bay View that there are two ways to get the suspension rates down.
The first way is to have clear rules uniformly enforced, and that means by every teacher and staff member must follow those rules. Alternatives to suspensions are thought out in advance and utilized. Sometimes a new principal may actually have a spike of suspensions at the beginning of his/her tenure, but the suspension numbers quickly fall as order is maintained.
The second way to get suspension numbers down is simply not to suspend anybody. The students run wild, and the school remains out of control. Unfortunately, too many principals fall into this second trap.
We can see this on the classroom level. One teacher is always sending students to the office, sometimes in groups of four or more students. Yet the discipline problems in that classroom remain. Meanwhile a teacher down the hall has an orderly and positive learning environment, and almost never sends a student to the office.
Of course, every teacher sometime in his/her career is going to have a difficult student or even a whole class where dramatic actions must be taken.
The message the superintendent needs to send to school officials is that safety is the highest priority. Suspension is a tool, but it is only one tool, and not necessarily the best tool. I don’t think that message is always getting through to our principals.
If a student has been suspended for the same infraction, such as wandering the halls, two or three times, does anyone think that suspending the student a fourth time is really going to change behavior?
Someone has to sit down with that student and try to figure out just what the problem is. It might be the student can’t read and doesn’t want to be embarrassed in class. There might be anger issues related to family problems. Maybe that student doesn’t want to be in that school and would be happier someplace else.
Suspending a student one or two times for wandering the halls might work for some students, but it isn’t going to work for continual problems.
A year ago, School Board President Michael Bond and I pushed for the creation of an assessment center where students with long term problems could be evaluated. The problems could be corrected and, in many cases, the students could be returned to their home schools.
The establishment of Violence Free Zone mentors have dramatically decreased the violence in many of our high schools and lowered the rate of suspensions.
Some students simply can’t function is a large high school setting, and they need alternative placements in smaller schools.
But just telling principals to get the suspension rates down doesn’t make our schools safer.
