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Speak Out
Is ‘zero tolerance’ the right approach to school discipline?
Say a fight breaks out in your school. Or a group of mischievous students plays a prank on the library during study hall. How do your teachers respond?
Is it in a calm, sympathetic manner, where the students are pulled aside and spoken with? Or does your school crack down on misbehavior in a hard and strict fashion, immediately issuing detentions, suspensions, perhaps even expulsions? Or is it somewhere in between?
In the interests of enforcing good behavior and maintaining an orderly learning environment, many schools across the country in recent decades have taken more of a zero-tolerance approach to discipline.
Some might go to extreme measures; last week a New Haven, Conn., woman alleged that her grandsons, ages 6 and 8, were required to lie on their backs and hold up heavy weights as punishment for misbehaving. The elementary school is under investigation by the state Department of Families and Children.
Now, it’s rare for a school to use corporal punishment of this sort.
But some schools are finding that their zero-tolerance policies are having negative repercussions all the same. More than a decade ago, in the wake of the massacre at Columbine High School, the state of Colorado reexamined its approach to school discipline, deciding it needed to be as strict as possible. This led to what are known as school resource officers, or police stationed full time in the state’s public schools.
Today, Colorado lawmakers have a phrase for the result – the “school-to-prison pipeline.” When students get in trouble, they can effectively be turned over directly to the police. In an op-ed in the Denver Post, state Sens. B.J. Nikkel, Linda Newell and Evie Hudak wrote, “In the last ten years, nearly 100,000 students from every corner of the state – in rural, suburban and metro areas alike – have been handed over to the police for issues that mostly used to be resolved in the principal’s office.”
Again, extreme anecdotes pop up; last month, police in Lakewood, Colo., pepper-sprayed an 8-year-old student, and a 10-year-old in Lafayette was arrested and held for several days after he brought a toy gun to school.
Sens. Nikkel, Newell and Hudak co-sponsored a plan that Gov. John Hickenlooper enacted yesterday; over the next year, state officials will review school discipline strategies to see what works and what doesn’t, and will report back results and suggestions in 2012. The hope is to reduce the number of students being referred to police for non-serious matters.
Padres and Jovenes Unidos, a community group supporting the school discipline review, was quoted in the Denver Daily News saying, “Zero-tolerance policies …can undermine good students’ educational opportunities and put them at a greater risk for involvement with the juvenile or criminal justice systems.”
The public school system in Jefferson County, Ky., is facing a similar concern with its zero-tolerance approach. This month, a complaint filed on behalf of a group of families alleged that the schools’ discipline practice is discriminatory to black students and disabled students, violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Americans With Disabilities Act.
According to the Louisville Courier-Journal, stats for the 2008-09 school year were staggering. Disabled students, who make up 16 percent of the school population, received 38 percent of all suspensions. Black students, who make up 35 percent of the school population, received 65 percent of all suspensions. (If the numbers seem confusing, it’s because students who are both black and disabled accounted for 71 percent of the suspended disabled students.)
Jefferson County public schools, however, have a policy against expulsion. A student who presents a problem is placed in an alternative program within the school, or at a partnering private alternative school. These schools receive their own share of complaints; according to the Courier-Journal, students are “pervasively and persistently teased by teachers and staff, physically restrained, confined in closet-like rooms, euphemistically called Behavior Centers or time-out rooms and are exposed to other forms of violence.”
Rebecca DiLoreto of the state’s Children’s Law Center told the Courier-Journal, “When you look at those statistics, you need to stop and ask if what they are doing is the right approach. If you push these children out of the school, they will more than likely end up in the criminal-justice system.”
Some schools, rather than reacting to past problems with discipline, are looking ahead. A Fall River, Mass., elementary school recently enacted what it hopes will be a form of positive discipline to quell lunchroom misbehavior. Students line up outside the cafeteria and are not allowed entry until they are quiet; students who act up are placed in suspension, but not in some dusty corner of the school isolated from classmates. Instead, the discipline room is close to the cafeteria so students hear the fun time they’re missing.
What do you think?
Is “zero tolerance” the right approach to school discipline? How could Colorado fix its “school-to-prison pipeline”? How should Jefferson County schools respond to charges of discrimination? Do you think approaches like the one in Fall River might prove more effective? Or is a strict approach to discipline the only way to go? If so, why? Join the discussion!
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