School Discipline: Inflexible Rule or Common Sense?
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54 responses to “School Discipline: Inflexible Rule or Common Sense?”
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I worked for 10 principals in 27 years. In Mr. Dick’s scenario of permitting principals to exercise discretion, I can think of 5 principals that used appropriate judgement. They tended to remain calm, gather the facts, be perceptive to the parties involved, and dispense the correct remedy.
And then there are the other 5 principals, who routinely got it wrong, adding to an unpleasant climate for learning. They weren’t bad people. They just were not cut out for calling balls and strikes behind home plate.
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Principals, and their approach to discipline establish the culture for, and effectiveness of, an entire school. I favor giving teachers the authority to manage discipline in their classrooms and to evict students they deem to be too violent and too disruptive. What happens from there can be decided by the building supervisor and the district administration.
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Teachers have that authority under Virginia law. § 22.1-276.2. Removal of students from classes.
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I never knew that. The bosses never explicitly told us of that authority and that it was backed up by the Code of Virginia.
https://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacode/title22.1/chapter14/section22.1-276.2/-
Gosh, I wonder why they would not tell you. Perhaps it just slipped their minds…
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Mr. Wayne I am renting plane and flying over every school in the Commonwealth.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/bd820c342836e77d45bc919810e9fa637634efb7e9d76ab98677b9b792eb77ef.jpg -
🙂
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Thanks. The key word in the statute is “initial.” Then it calls for all sorts of limitations on that authority. I would make their decisions final subject to year-end review of their overall performance including class performance on SOLs.
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“They just were not cut out for calling balls and strikes behind home plate.”
But legislators in Richmond…??
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Never said that now did I?
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That is what Sherlock is calling for though…
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The chaotic discipline issues our schools face will continue for the rest of this year and perhaps into next. No matter who calls for what, there will be more headlines.
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Reasonableness and the real world are too often subjected to intellectualized conceptions by woke conservatives presenting absolutist, inflexible constraints upon behavior and dynamic situations. Saddling principals, or teachers, with legal responsibility for routine, innocent physical contact is an example.
Nice work in offering context.
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Yep. Everytime something happens, the boo-birds mobilize and basically attack the schools and their leaders and teachers for “failing”… no matter there might be 20,000 students in the district and 99.9% of incidents are handled reasonably well… it’s that one that went sideways that DEMANDS revolutionary change so that it “never” happens again.
Schools are wild places sometimes especially these days with adults acting out in school board meetings, social media and “activist” groups.
One false move and someone is in deep doo doo in today’s environment.
Dick makes a point about “assault”. If a principal or a teacher “lays a hand” on a student, can they be fired, charged, etc?
We make a lot of comments about law enforcement and how they should handle themselves. I’d posit that these days , teachers are in a similar position where they are working in risky environments where they can be assaulted themselves or they can be accused of wrong behavior almost at the same time.
We have a ton of folks who tell the schools, administrators, teachers what they should be doing who really do not have the same level of appreciation that people who do that work every day , do.
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“ Dick makes a point about “assault”. If a principal or a teacher “lays a hand” on a student, can they be fired, charged, etc?”
“ Virginia statute explicitly states that corporal punishment is prohibited in public schools, but it does allow for some limited exceptions. The law also says that “due deference” will given to judgments made at the time by the teachers or principals involved.”
So, no. Loopholes, Son, lookin’ for loopholes.
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School Discipline: Inflexible Rule or Common Sense?
Yes. A good dose of both is called for, in my opinion. Certain rules need to be inflexible. Others can be subject to situational considerations.
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Rape is located well within the Inflexible Rule Zone as far as I am concerned.
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Right, but it wasn’t seen as such in the military for a long while. Now it’s being fixed. Censoring aside.
Apparently school discipline and military discipline have nothing in common, even when one attempts to structure on the failure of the other.
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Discretion is not bad per se, but it leaves principal’s open to law suits.
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And retaliation from parents who can blame principals for making a judgment call. Battery should not be a judgment call.
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And Dick has made a very clear case why it should be…
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Agreed, Dick.
There’s also the perspective of empowering the victim, allowing them to have some say.
In some cases, victims (especially teachers and aides), may not report minor battery if they know that the principal has no choice but to involve law enforcement.
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Kinda like a battered spouse? One thing that doesn’t work is letting the victim decide. The first call ended when the spouse refused to press charges, and the last call ends at the morgue.
What was that cute little blond girl’s name? You know, the one whose body was found in Utah and her boyfriend’s body turned up in a Florida swamp.
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No, nothing like a battered spouse. More like a child gets emotional and pushes a teacher. Teacher understands there’s a lot going on at home, in school, etc. impacting the child’s emotional state. Plus, no injury. Action should be taken, but if the principal is mandated to report to law enforcement. Teacher doesn’t want to compound the child’s stressors (not to mention what might happen at home), so they decide not to report.
Or the principal, walking down the hall in between classes, who sees a student shove another. Classic bully scenario. With a zero tolerance policy they’d have to report to law enforcement. But such an extreme response would just ostracize the bullied student even more among their peers, even if they have no say in the matter.
Discretion isn’t about jumping to the extremes, Nancy. It’s about empowering those with all of the context to make rationale decisions in the gray areas.
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“It’s about empowering those with all of the context to make rationale decisions in the gray areas.”
You do realize, that’s going to have a failure rate, right?
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A “failure” rate either path?
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Oh no. Zero Tolerance doesn’t have failures. It does EXACTLY what it does. It just has a lot of unhappy results.
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Well, Nancy what doesn’t have a failure rate. Seems like we get someone whining here in an article about criminal justice system failures from the police to the courts and prosecutors every week.
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And that’s exactly why “zero tolerance” is a dumb approach!
Kids are still developing themselves and they do things more impulsively than later on when more mature (not all).
And one-size-fits-all (I have no choice but to put you in the “system” ) can ruin a young persons’ life.
Good teachers and others who deal with young people know this . Good parents know this. But there are a pile of others who either do not know or have forgotten as they have gotten older.
We’ve got way too many folks these days who have really bad ideas who ought not be taken seriously.
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“Hopefully” is not a strategy. “Common sense” is not always common.
And battery should not be a judgment call on the part of principals. Your solution exposes them to too much community pressure.
They have enough to deal with.
You wrote “It is the role of superintendents and school boards to provide support and protection.”
Do you, as a principal, presume that the school board in Richmond or Portsmouth is going to provide such “support and protection”?
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Where does this supposed “community pressure” come from?
Let’s assume there’s an offense for which the principal doesn’t get law enforcement involved, for whatever reason.
For there to be “community pressure”, there would need to be (1) knowledge of the offense by the community and (2) and offense great enough to draw the ire of the community.
If those conditions exist, why is the principal the only party responsible for reporting the offense? Couldn’t the victim or their parent report it?
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“They have enough to deal with.”
By creating an onus on principals to report each and every deliberate physical contact to law enforcement when in many of cases a simple detention and/or stern warning could have sufficed, the change you suggest would mean principals would suddenly have more to deal with.
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But it takes the heavy lift of thinking out of it.
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From the principal with their advanced degrees in education and transfers the weight to a school cop… What could go wrong…?
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Amazing to me that those who prefer a cold calculated response of the justice system are the same as those who rail against any attempts to analyze the results, e.g., CRT.
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“Battery” does not have to be a judgment call and Dick is not focusing on “battery” but assault, it’s lesser cousin. You argued that a principal should not have to make a legal judgment whether something isa felony or a misdemeanor. That’s A Straw man, the law requires ALL the former to be reported while allowing the situations described by Dick to be handled through school discipline. I agree with Dick that the police should not be forced to investigate Sally’s slap over Johnny’s insult.
Zero Tolerance has never been a winning policy on anything, Ever. But, likewise self-policing doesn’t work well either.
We can look at hundreds of examples of organizations using “common sense” to very bad ends..
Your local PD calls it “Internal Affairs”, the military calls it “Chain of Command”, Fox News called it “Nondisclosure Agreements”, and the NFL calls it Roger Goodell. When these systems fail, the rest of us call it “cover up” or CYA.
There kinda just has to be a Bright Red Line after which there can be no quiet handling within the organization.
OTOH, maybe the answer is what we’ve got… “works most of the time with occasional colossal failures” just to remind us it isn’t perfect.
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What I am arguing for is what we have now. The law gives the principal the discretion (“may report”) to bring in the police.
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Yes.
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Yes, I know, Dick. With all its warts, it’s still better than documented outcomes from any attempts at hard definition, no choice methods. But, it does have warts.
The problem isn’t necessarily with the system but with those who are cocksure that “this time zero tolerance will work” — the same group who rail against prosecutorial discretion, parole boards, the rehab in “punish and rehabilitate”…
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dead certain outcomes will scare the bejsus out of evil doers… it’s a belief system.
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I’m trying to decide. Do I bucket wash my car today, or drive through the car wash and accept the less than satisfactory but highly consistent results? Wonder which my car prefers? 😁
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My apologies for the comment above. My sarcasm detector blinked out for a minute. I now get your point
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Oh Bill, s’alright. I sometimes swing the bat both directions. If I can’t hit a homer swinging for the cheap seats, I might catch the catcher in the eye on the backstroke. I’m not above just throwing the bat too.
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There kinda just has to be a Bright Red Line after which there can be no quiet handling within the organization.
Agreed. Now all we need to do is decide where that line is as regards illegal, and potentially illegal, and outright criminal behavior within our public schools.
That’s where the argument lies. Personally, I’d err on the side of reporting physical attacks to the police and letting them decide whether the particular behavior warrants arrest, and letting prosecutors determine whether it warrants adjudication. A lot of the police decision-taking could be made at the school resource officer level, assuming we have not gotten rid of school resource officers.
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Right. So, first we establish that Bright Red Line. Now, what age does it apply to?
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The line should apply to all ages. The responses, punishments, and end results should be adjusted for age and maturity levels.
And keep in mind. I’m talking about physical attacks, not just pushing, shoving, slapping and shooting rubber bands. If it draws blood or causes bruising it should probably be reported and investigated.
In hockey, if your penalty causes bleeding or injury, it will result in an extra 2-minutes in the box, a 5-minute major, or sometimes at the discretion of the principal/police (aka referee), a match penalty and removal from the game.
After a match penalty, the prosecutor/judge (aka NHL) sometimes steps in and suspends a player for a particularly grievous offense.
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Ah HA! Blood! The bright red line!
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The Art of Disciplining? The Science of Disciplining? Hmmmm.
Common sense make sense. But one person’s “common sense” can be totally unreasonable to others. It might make sense for school board members and principals to discuss. Ditto for principals and school employees so that there could be some meeting of the minds and consistent application of the rules. And perhaps a further discussion with parents at a PTA/PTO meeting.
I guess it comes down to this … you trust school administrators. I don’t. While many may be fine, it only takes one bad apple to do real harm. We’ve seen plenty of poor judgement exhibited recently by Virginia school officials. The inability to find a gun carried by a six year old resulted in a teacher being shot. The willingness to sweep a sexual assault under the rug resulted in the student being transferred and a second sexual assault occurring. Finally, the willingness to hide gender dysphoria from the legal guardians of a child in Virginia resulted in the child being sex trafficked – not once but twice.
Poor judgement seems a too regular occurrence in Virginia schools.
Perhaps if the principal and the school resource officer both agree that the battery was too minor to report then it can be ignored.
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Is this the “Rippert Rule?”. One bad apple results in the police investigating all the Slapping Sally cases. Sheesh, don’t they have enough to do already.
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Incompetent or venal people can screw up anything. Dunno how we uniformly get better administrators.
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