School Discipline for Dummies

The video of a vicious fight at Hazelbrook Middle School goes viral for all the wrong reasons.

By now, unless you have sealed yourself off from social media, you have no doubt seen replays of this video of a hallway brawl in a Tualatin middle school (in the suburbs, where this sort of stuff isn’t supposed to happen)…

It’s a video tailor-made for viral outrage…

…with a boy wearing a bra, staging his/her/its attack from behind, dragging the victim (a girl—where are the feminists?) around by her hair, a few merciless hits when the victim is down, classmates standing around like spectators at a corrida and the noxious suspicion that someone manning the iPhone camera knew what was about to happen—that, in fact, it was some kind of weird performance.

The provenance of the video was murky, along with follow-up videos showing the boy-with-the-bra making a similar attack: same MO (attack from behind, female victim). unblinking iPhone eye.

The video was bad enough, compounded by a school district that clearly had no idea how to contain the fallout…

The superintendent, Sue Reiki-Smith, went on TV…

…and became .the latest Big Girl whose automatic defense is attack, and a quick change-of-focus on the real issue. Her theme was echoed, in its own doilies on the armchair way, by the Oregonian…

…while TV and even local pirate media averted their gaze, visibly relieved when some nutter emailed a bomb-threat and shut the school down.

Whew. Not a moment too soon!

As a meme or trope or whatever, it had a chickens coming home to roost quality, since the breakdown of discipline in our socialized schools has been making headlines for some time. Remember, post covid lockdown…

Reynolds Middle School has announced that they are closing their school for three weeks due to repeated misbehavior and fights among their students. There have been a string of uninterrupted fights among students.  Among the girls have complained about “Slap-ass Fridays” where they become targets of sexual harassment.  Some have complained of being hit in the breasts and crotch.

…and this recent Oregonian report…

…just to grab a couple at random.

The response from school bureaucrats and the local media:

Blame those Covid shutdowns!

But it isn’t that simple, for reasons that most parents don’t suspect, mainly because public education is a closed black box. For example, if you sought guidance on how schools proceed when a kid misbehaves you’d find this…

Let’s go back to the infamous video. Here’s how the educational progressive would see it:

The transkid in question isn’t doing something bad; he certainly doesn’t deserve anything as passé as “punishment” or, for that matter, “a consequence.” In the bad old days, in which most of the school system’s taxpayers grew up, those punishments might have gone from writing “I will not sucker-punch a girl” 100 times on the blackboard to a visit to the principal’s office and a meeting with “the board of education.”

Can’t happen.

Says the Oregon Department of Education…

The use of aversive methods to change behavior is unnecessary and not supported by research. The field of education is continually and intentionally moving away from punitive approaches to a focus on clearly teaching and reinforcing school expectations, through care, connection, and ongoing support to assure learning and growth in functional, academic and behavior domains is continual and progressing.

This rather utopian goal is supposed to happen under the umbrella of federal, state, and local rules and regulations—enough, as one teacher said, “To fill a 500-page book.”

Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 opened the door to defining some misbehaving kids as “disabled,” which took 36 pages to explain, and was followed two years later by Part B of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). The feds were quick to scold the locals…

OCR’s continued enforcement experience reflects that many students with disabilities face discipline because they are not receiving the support, services, interventions, strategies, and modifications to school or district policies that they need to manage their disability-based behavior.

Give this statement a moment’s thought and you’ll peer into the heart of the progressive argument (and takeover)…

Note that last sentence: the typical young thug, bully, sociopath-in-waiting is—guess what!

Another victim!

Upon this rock—to the surprise of many parents, including the parents of the young girl pummelled on video—the edifice of school discipline now rests.

One of the questions arising from the viral videos: where’s a teacher as a major assault takes place in a busy hallway?

Could a teacher have broken up the assault? Grabbed the assailant—a big kid, trans, and evidently a POC?

Here’s what the feds have to say about “physical restraint:”

…a personal restriction that immobilizes or reduces the ability of a student to move his or her torso, arms, legs, or head freely. The term physical restraint does not include a physical escort. Physical escort means a temporary touching or holding of the hand, wrist, arm, shoulder or back for the purpose of inducing a student who is acting out to walk to a safe location.

…but then warns…

…a school’s inappropriate use of mechanical, physical, or other restraints… or use of seclusion in response to student behaviors could deny the student FAPE or constitute disability discrimination, as explained in prior OCR guidance.

FAPE, in the acronym-happy Department of Education, translates as “Free Appropriate Public Education.” What constitutes “appropriate would keep a legion of lawyers busy (and their kids in Stanford); no socialized education is “free.” Just check your property-tax bill.

Defining “temporary touching or holding” after the fact equals messy litigation. In the real world, it’s a massive no-no; every teacher knows the basic commandment…

Kids cannot be touched.

Nor could the Tualatin kid have been hauled off against his/her/its will and put somewhere to cool off; that would involve a “seclusion room,” which triggers state reporting requirements and dozens of specifications for square-footage (64) and unbreakable glass…

It’s an “intervention,” and in the new era it must be part of a plan and lots of hours of filling out state-mandated forms and dispatching them to the overseers at the state and federal levels—lifetime jobs for battalions of bureaucrats.

None of this follows what every halfway decent parent knows: the offense and the “consequence”—all right, we’ll call it a punishment—must be immediate. Fights must be broken up, no waiting for them to appear on TikTok; responsibility apportioned; kids grounded; cellphones confiscated.

Not every misbehaving kid gets the free ticket of “disability.” But there are a host of other programs, plans, rules, regs available.

A leading program is called Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports. It’s the backbone of the David Douglas system’s new cadre of assistant principals…

Here’s a colloquy with Oregon Public Broadcasting and Kathleen Lower, the new assistant principal of restorative practices at Cherry Park Elementary…

If there’s behavior or anything we need to deal with, we can work through it in a restorative way — having restorative conferences and really working with the kids, so they understand their behaviors.

What sort of disciplinary models are you looking to replace with this?

Definitely the exclusionary models such as detentions and suspensions, where kids are sent away from the room for extended periods of time.

A full explanation of the thick crust of federal and state laws, regulations, and “dear colleague” letters would burn up our bandwidth (and your patience)…but let’s stipulate that all of these legal funnels lead to…

Meetings…

Battalions of professionals convene, always after the fact, and come up with any number of acronym-heavy programs…IEP’s, 504’s, Positive Behavior Interventions (with tiers I through III).

If a kid is a real problem, a meeting might cram parents, teacher, an assistant principal for restorative justice, behavioral specialist, counselor, school psychologist, speech pathologist, even the principal into one ZOOM call.

Long after the incident.

Whatever the team comes up with requires paperwork—lots of forms and filling-out—dispatched to some drab office in Salem, where more bureaucrats process the forms…

If it’s a minor-league issue, there might be a bit of “restorative justice,” and a meeting between the perp and the victim. Lots of “feelings,” and “reconciliation.”

One teacher was forced to “reconcile” with a kid who invaded her classroom and refused to leave. When the kid was asked how she thought the teacher felt, she answered, “Scared.”

A life-lesson for a budding sociopath.

There are dozens of other bandaids applied to student discipline without verging on dreaded punishment. For example a “star chart” for kiddies, with a teacher required to help fill out a list of goals every 30 minutes or, if the teacher’s lucky, only for a half-hour before and after class—for every kid in the program.

Or little certificates given to students, usually awarded for doing what kids are expected to do, redeemable at the school store.

As one teacher summed up: They’re good for the good kids; bad for the bad kids.

It’s a sentiment that will never be uttered within earshot of the progressive commissars by any teacher counting days until retirement.

Nope, what a civilian might call misbehavior is seen as kids slugging one another because they are just trying to communicate. Figure that out, and everyone’s happy, well-adjusted…and no reports to the feds.

Thus, progressives make plans, mindless that executing them is their habitual weak point (see: 110, measure). Failure simply triggers more plans! More professionals! More “support!”

What sort of “support” might appeal to a kid who, last count, has decked two (maybe more) classmates and is now in trouble with the law? A set of boxing gloves? Brass knuckles?

That’s a plan we’d love to see.