When one scoundrel student throws a classroom into chaos, teachers have long relied on the power to send the offending student out. But with a directive to keep kids in their desks, schools are trying to adapt.
“In some cases it means Saturday detention,” said Prince George’s County school board member Rosalind Johnson, who sits on the district’s Suspension Reduction Task Force, created last spring to try to bring down the district’s shocking number of offenses. In 2007-08. more than 21,000 incidents led to suspensions of at least one day, according to state records.
“But too often children doing the foolish behavior are just bored. Those kids need a curriculum and a way of teaching that excites them,” Johnson said.
Johnson, a former teacher, is the first to concede that creating a more creative curriculum is a common refrain but an uncommon talent, even among good teachers.
“In this business we do what we do to get every child we can, but the tragedy of all this is that sometimes it fails,” she said.
In neighboring Montgomery County, Chief School Performance Officer Stephen Bedford told the County Council that keeping kids in the classroom requires a mental shift from “the power to remove toward the power to identify strategies to keep students in class.” Bedford was part of a presentation before the council about declining suspension rates in the county.
“By changing the culture we can change the outcomes,” Bedford said from his central office perch.
But even in the trenches, teachers and administrators sing that refrain. In Alexandria, middle schools were split this year from two into five “small schools” operating in two buildings. Teachers, administrators, and many parents jumped on board in the hopes that smaller communities of students would create a safer and kinder school culture.
“These are adolescents, we have to work with them, not just send them out,” said Linda Whitfield, one of two principals at George Washington Middle School. “That’s why people go into education — to work with these kids.”
