We really can't throw away kids

 Getting Rid of Problems Really Doesn’t Work

 

For a long time the mantra in schools has been, we just need to get rid of the trouble makers so the rest of the kids can learn and teachers can teach.   Turns out that really is not good advice.

First of all, research has shown that suspending kids really does not improve behavior.  In fact, they are more likely to misbehave in the future.  Often being at home, means they are without supervision and are out in the streets and with unsavory characters.

Secondly, there is the notion that suspending a student will help him/her “get back on track”.  In reality, just the opposite happens.  Being out of school means the child gets farther behind academically.  The longer the suspension the greater the damage to the child’s academic achievement.  Plus, as achievement falls, the student’s self-concept as a learner falls as well.  The child begins to think of herself as not being able to learn as opposed to just not learning right now.  In school discipline, combined with continued instruction is much more effective.

But what about the rest of the kids?  The notion has been that excluding the troublemakers helps the other kids learn because the attention can be more on them and less on bad behavior.  Turns out that myth is just a myth as well.  Students identify with each other more than they do with the adults dishing out the punishment.  Kids have a strong sense of justice.  It may be their own justice system but it is strong nonetheless.  Consequently, if kids think the suspension was unfair or unjust they will be resentful of the teacher who punished their friend.  These feelings of resentment interfere with the learning of the not-suspended kids as with the ones who were suspended.

Prior to the pandemic, well over 2.5 million students received at least one suspension in the school year.  These suspensions disproportionately affect students of color, students with disabilities, students experiencing trauma in their personal lives or lower socio-economic status.  Black students have significantly longer suspensions than children of other races.  If what we are trying to do is improve educational outcomes for all kids then we are going about that effort in a backwards manner.

Kids need to receive the consequences of their behavior, no question about that.  But those consequences need to be directly linked to the actual behavior not to just pushing the issue out of the school and into the community.  There needs to be a system of restorative justice that all students buy into and that really changes behavior without the negative fallout. Getting rid of our problems by tossing them into the street doesn’t work.

The high cost of energy

 The high cost of energy

 

Schools are having to deal with lots more student disruptive behavior and the teachers have a lot less energy to manage the behaviors. Schools are seeing lockdowns and outsider aggression.   Many educators are on edge because of staff shortages and staff quarantine.  Each of the five largest school districts in Maryland opened school this fall still looking hundreds of teachers.  All opened with long-term substitutes in positions where certified teachers should be.  And that is after huge salary increases.  To add to the stress, there aren’t enough bus drivers to get the kids to school.  Some teachers are reporting that they feel as tired now as they typically do at Thanksgiving.

Teachers are demonstrating their stress in differing  ways.  They are raising their voices more often and are quicker to add consequences for behaviors.  They are calling out sick more often. Kids are being suspended at a higher rate.

The pandemic has not just hit children and their families; it has disrupted the family lives of teachers as well.  School counselors say they are overwhelmed both by student needs and staff needs.

More attention is finally being paid to the social emotional needs of students.  Families are not complaining so much about meeting those needs.  In the past, it was not unusual for parents resist social-emotional attention and insist that the time be spent on academics.  Now with kids returning to school and showing the mental health damage brought on by quarantining at home and absence of social contact, attitudes are changing.

There is a heavy emphasis on making schools more welcoming to differing populations of students and often it is the kids who are leading the way in those efforts. Kids are organizing clubs for marginal populations and majority students are going as well because the, too, want to understand. Students are much more in need of someone to listen.  But listening to someone else’s problems takes energy and right now that is energy teachers don’t seem to have themselves.  Counselors are in short supply and are spending big chunks of their time doing scheduling and testing. 

Students need a time out and someone to walk and talk with.  But so do teachers.  Energy is being drained from both sides.   It seems that now kids need our energy the most and yet teachers have the least to give.  The high cost of energy isn’t just at the gas pumps.

Killing Right at Home

 Killing right at home

 

There is another epidemic in our country besides COVID.  It is the incidence of domestic violence.  Every day in our country, according to the National Network to End Domestic violence, approximately three women are murdered by an intimate partner.  Three women have died in Maryland of spousal abuse in the last few months.  The epidemic of spousal abuse and violence has increased dramatically in the last two years, partly due to the confines of quarantine and the pandemic.

The warning signs are clear: over possessiveness, isolation, verbal abuse and gaslighting.  So, what does all this have to do with kids in school.  Children live in these homes.  These behaviors are not limited to the other adult in the home.  Children too are impacted by these behaviors.  All educators are mandated by law to report any abuse to child protective services.  But these are physical abuses.  How do we catalog and report emotional abuse.

As with all things we are counting, we need to begin by identifying the problem and the situation.  As educators we need to teach children what kinds of behaviors are not healthy in a home.  These behaviors are just as unacceptable and damaging as physical abuse, in some sense maybe more so because we do not see them as obviously.

We need to teach children how they should be treated.   When they are not treated in a positive and supportive manner, they need to know that the problem is not with them but with the abuser. We need to make sure girls do not learn that it is ok to be dominated by a male partner.  We need to teach boys that being a man does not mean bullying a woman.  We must create a common language for talking about a situation that is hard to define and even harder to stamp out.  We need to teach our kids how to recognize abusive relationships so they can report them to us and to their friends.  We need to teach our kids so they can teach their friends to recognize what is happening as well.  

In every instance of murder and abuse, the red flags were there.  Intervention could have saved a life in the short term and changed a child’s future long term.  It is too late after a death to see the warning signs and it is too late to change a child’s future after he/she has seen the killing right at home.

 

PPSD in schools

 PPSD in Schools

 

Last week students at Annapolis High School got into a knife fight in the morning of a school day.  Things were serious enough that two students were hospitalized and seven were arrested for fighting and disrupting the school day.  The school was put on lock down, no one in and no one out of the building.   Parents were advised not to try and pick up their children because they would not be admitted.

What is going on in our schools?  For the last 18 months kids have lived their social lives mainly online.  They have been texting and emailing words and images they might not have done in person.  Now they are in person and back in the school building and many of these inappropriate online behaviors have transferred into the schools.

There are other upticks in inappropriate behaviors.  Kids have shorter tempers than usual.  They are trashing bathrooms, fighting over social media posts and/or running out of classrooms when they are frustrated.   Other children are moving inwards, heads on desks, not talking to others.  Returning to in-person learning means there is much less downtime to recharge and much less flexibility.

Some children in some communities have experienced greater loss from the pandemic.  For economically disadvantaged communities more jobs have been lost and more people in their close circle have died or been very sick.

The chronic stress and anxiety of the pandemic have triggered the “fight or flight” survival aspects of our brains.  Some people will want to retreat and hide away.  Others are on high alert and an infraction like a nudge in the hallway that would usually be ignored becomes a reason for a very big reaction.

Staff are more exhausted as well.   They, too, getting back in buildings where there is more structure and less flexibility than online teaching.  They do not have the energy to keep the tight reins on behavior that they might usually have.

It seems all that talk about socialization skills particularly in the earlier grades is true.  Teachers of young children are reporting socialization skills that are at least two years behind expectation.  Older kids seem to have forgotten how to socialize while younger ones have yet to learn. 

Some students are fearful of catching the virus in schools.

Kids want to be back in school.  School is their place to be with friends, to learn and to have a structure to their lives.  We just need to realize that just opening the schoolhouse isn't going to be easy or enough to manage the post-pandemic stress disorder that kids and staff are suffering.