Read the minds and hearts of children to discipline in a way that heals

Midst the patter of polite applause, against a backdrop of a floral centerpiece surrounded by punch and cookies, we heard something shocking.

The Guilderland School Board last week was honoring its best employees in an annual ritual meant to inspire.  Five diverse educators were being feted.

The words that arrested us were these, spoken by a principal, describing a young student: “He yelled, he spit on her, he tried to run away.”

The educator being honored was the psychologist at Guilderland Elementary School, Kirsten Eidle-Barkman.

We’ve been yelled at and spit on; it is not pleasant. In fact, it is humiliating and enraging. A natural response would be to strike back and, if you were an educator dealing with a student, to discipline that student in a punitive way, to teach him a lesson as it were.

That’s not what Eidle-Barkman did.

She came up with strategies that would get to the root of the child’s problems and solve them.

“The child responded remarkably well to her plan,” reported Principal Allan Lockwood, and became a successful student.

We don’t know who this student was. Was he new to this country, just learning its language and customs? Guilderland Elementary has many such students. Did he have a disability? Twelve percent of Guilderland students do. Was he from a poor family? Guilderland has 15 percent of its students coming from families who live below the poverty line.

What matters is: Whatever his background, someone was wise enough not to use traditional punitive discipline but to figure out what was wrong and solve it. That was good for his classmates and good for him.

This approach reminded us of an educator and author, Eric Jensen, whom we learned about as we were researching suburban poverty for our back-to-school edition this fall. His philosophy is being used successfully in at least one local school.

“Cooperation, patience, embarrassment, empathy, gratitude, and forgiveness are crucial to a smoothly running, complex social environment like a classroom,” Jensen writes. “When students lack these learned responses, teachers who expect humility or penitence may get a smirk instead, a response that may lead teachers to believe a student has an ‘attitude.’”

He believes, if students have been deprived of these essential lessons, the school must teach them.

Jensen offers practical “action steps,” for example, on respect.  “It is fruitless simply to demand respect from students,” Jensen writes.  “Many just don’t have the context, background, or skills to show it.”

Instead, he offers six alternatives, such as avoiding directives in favor of offering choices, modeling adult thinking, avoiding demeaning sarcasm, disciplining through positive relationships rather than exerting power, sharing decision-making in class, and giving respect to students first even when they seem least to deserve it.

Last week’s Guilderland celebration took place at the start of a school board meeting that began with men speaking in favor of a long-retired coach who 40 years ago had been reprimanded for what many saw as typical hands-on discipline at the time.

The new way is better — perhaps harder, but better.

A Congressional briefing in 2013 focused on the growing use of punitive disciplinary measures in public schools. Two groundbreaking reports have set the standards for national discussion since.

In “Out of School and Off Track,” Daniel Losen and Tia Elena Martinez use data from the United States Department of Education to show that well over two million students, or one in nine, were suspended during the 2009-2010 academic year, with students of color, English learners, and students with disabilities suffering an unfair proportion of the suspensions.

One in four black students and one in five students with disabilities and one in five English learners are suspended, the data from across the country showed. More than a third — 36 percent — of all black male students with disabilities were suspended at least once.

This is disturbing because research shows that being suspended even once in ninth grade is associated with a 32-percent risk for dropping out, double that for those receiving no suspensions. Schools should be a place where students can learn, not just academic subjects, but how to behave in a larger society.

The second report, “Closing the School Discipline Gap: Research to Practice,” features 16 reports debunking the myth that punitive disciplinary measures are needed to create safe and productive school climates.

What may be easier — getting a disruptive student out of the classroom — is not the best for the student or for the society at large.

This is relevant for New Yorkers because a bill has been introduced (A.8369) that would reduce school suspensions to promote a more positive school climate.

At a press conference on Oct. 8, a coalition of local, state, and national organizations promoted the bill, saying its goal is to “reverse the disturbing school-to-prison pipeline, which starts with excessive use of suspensions, often for minor infractions.”

The problem in our state is huge. During the 2012-13 school year, the most recent for which data is available, 94,877 students were suspended — that’s more than 500 suspensions each day. Even kindergartners have been suspended for typical age-level behavior.

One of the proponents of the legislation is Judith Kaye, formerly New York’s chief judge who now chairs the Permanent Judicial Commission on Justice for Children.

In her statement of support, Kaye, with piercing accuracy, pinpointed the false choice “between accountability and compassion when responding to our children when they misbehave, disrupt class, or defy us.”

“We can have both,” said Kaye of compassion and accountability. “We must have both.”

She goes on to say public schools should not push out troubled kids but, rather, they should “have positive alternatives and discipline strategies that build reflection and impulse control as well as a strong sense of community.”

We believe that’s what Eidle-Barkman did, and she deserves applause from all of us.

A law would require educators and entire districts that have zero-tolerance policies to rethink and revamp their approach to discipline.

We like the thought a town judge, up for re-election in Knox, who, incidentally, is a retired Guilderland teacher, shared with us this week.

“Every case is judged on its own merit,” said Judge James Corigliano of how he runs his courtroom. He stressed that sentencing is not predetermined but, rather, varies with individual circumstances.

He gave the example of two people, each with speeding tickets for driving 45 miles per hour in a zone for 35. The fine would be different for someone who could “care less about the safety of others” than for someone “taking his wife to the hospital in labor,” said Corigliano.

So, too, must school discipline be fitted to the circumstances of each infraction; a blanket and automatic suspension is a blunt and harmful tool.

We’ll close with words recalled by Judge Kaye. They were spoken by the great abolitionist, author, and orator Frederick Douglass: “It’s easier to build strong children than repair broken men,” he said. Kaye added “and women.”

— Melissa Hale-Spencer

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