Some educators still cling to the mentality that all the problems of society have been unfairly dumped on schools and that schools should be focused primarily on academics. Models aimed at facilitating classroom communities in which students learn to help one another and embrace individual differences. Models that are effective at teaching kids the social skills they are lacking. Models aimed at involving kids in solving the problems that are causing their challenging behavior have significantly reduced or eliminated detention and suspension and helped kids remain in their general education classrooms when they would have otherwise been placed in special programs outside the mainstream. There are programs that have been implemented in schools that have transformed school culture and the ways in which educators respond to and help kids with social, emotional, and behavioral challenges.
There are a variety of non-punitive, non-adversarial interventions that can change that yet in many schools, those interventions aren’t being applied. The fact that these numbers are so high and that these kids are accessing the school discipline program so frequently is proof that the school discipline program isn’t working. dole out about 100,000 expulsions, 3 million out-of-school suspensions, 3 million in-school suspensions, and millions of detentions every school year. Nor does arresting a kid at school and punting his problems to the courts.Īnd yet, depending on the size of a school, there is often a small number of students accounting for the vast majority of discipline referrals in each building. Detentions don’t nor do suspensions, expulsions or paddling. Punitive interventions don’t solve those problems. We are far more productive when we’re trying to solve those problems than we are when we’re simply modifying the behaviors caused by those problems. If we only focus on the signals - the behaviors - we overlook the problems that are causing those behaviors. It communicates that a kid is struggling to meet certain social, behavioral and academic expectations. But challenging behavior is simply a signal. Such policies focus exclusively on a student’s challenging behavior and apply an algorithm of punitive, adult-imposed consequences for those behaviors.
Zero tolerance policies haven’t helped (in fact, the Zero Tolerance Task Force of the American Psychological Association tells us that zero tolerance policies have made things worse). They tell me they’ve never seen such extreme behaviors in so many kids at such young ages. My colleagues in schools tell me there have never been more kids in this kind of trouble. These are the kids who end up disenfranchised, marginalized and alienated.
Their parents and teachers are often at a loss for how to help them, and not for lack of trying. The ones on the social margins, who have difficulty being a part of the social fabric of a school.
The ones who have difficulty meeting behavioral expectations at home and school, and often have difficulty meeting academic expectations as well. He was a “loner.” He talked about guns and knives. But those of us who work in mental health, schools, law enforcement and treatment facilities are likely to find what we’ve read about his path toward tragedy to be eerily familiar. Nor have I met those who tried to help him through the years. I’ve never met Nikolas Cruz, who carried out the horrific shooting in Parkland, Florida, on Wednesday.
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