After more than a year of public debate, the Rochester school board unanimously approved a new code of conduct policy last night. Board members Malik Evans and Cynthia Elliott were not present and did not vote.
The new policy steers student discipline away from a more punitive approach to instead focus on restorative justice-style practices, such as having students talk about the impact that their behavior has on their peers and on the school environment.
The policy limits suspensions to only the most serious offenses.
The policy change discussion has been closely watched by the Rochester school community, drawing the attention of students, family members, and community activists.
Critics of the district’s high suspension rates cite national studies as well as district data showing that black students receive harsher punishment than their white peers for the same offenses.
Some teachers and administrators say that they support the new policy in principle, but that many students also need social-emotional support and alternative programs, but they aren’t getting that help.
School board President Van White said that approving the new policy is just the first step in improving school climate and that implementation is the real challenge.
This article appears in Jun 15-21, 2016.
I do not see how an already stretch budget is going to be able to supply all of the supports required to make this work. Restorative justice is not a program. It is an approach, a philosophy and it requires buy-in at all levels, which he will never get and can’t mandate. It also requires core resources that provide the social and emotional supports these kids need. Again, these are unlikely to happen with the fidelity required. There is no heart and soul behind any of this and the end result will be more disruption, less learning time and more people leaving.
This is simply another triumph for liberal idealism and a defeat for pragmatic efforts to improve bad school environments. It will likely have a net contribution of worsening those environments and furthering the exodus from RCSD.
On 3/22/2014 the D and C ran the article “Erica Bryant: A school for the kids who want to learn” giving an in-person, very sober perspective on a day at East High School. It was an extraordinarily significant contribution and sadly unique (probably due to PC pressures). The number of fights that year at East I believe was later reported as over 700. If people want to help RCSD – and the “kids who want to learn” – then they would do well to listen to such reports.
Tim had his chance several years ago in an “in depth series” but he passed on any followup to the most insightful comments provided – a student responding that ‘students can learn if they want to’ and that they wished that the ‘disruptive kids would be removed from the classrooms’ (the latter’s contributions made painfully clear in Bryant’s article).
If Bryant had had the time she could have provided another look at East High School. She could have spent an afternoon at the practice of East High School’s boy basketball team. That year they would have been preparing for the end of their season. Their season ended in the State’s Big School bracket finals! In the beautiful and demanding sport of basketball they had succeeded in a very big way and their approach had been exactly the opposite of the reformer idealists. Of course the program is for kids who want to (learn) basketball and of course they would not have hesitated to use disciplinary measures to correct disruptions.
Finally, for people buying the race-angle provided here you might try reading the Race-related articles that the New York Times has been running in the last year or so. Almost invariably those articles are followed up by heavy criticism from their readers (I read the Readers’ Picks comments). The abuse of the race issue is ironically championed by liberal activists but it ultimately brings harm to the African American community – including of course their ‘kids who want to learn’.
It is easy to get off on idealism. The challenge in education (and life) is try to stay real.