From Catalyst Chicago:

By Rebecca Harris On Monday, March 21, 2011

In High Schools In the month that Tyese Sims has been principal of Orr High, she has dropped 44 students from the rolls, she acknowledges. But one community group is accusing her of turning away as many as 150.

At a community meeting on Saturday, tensions over discipline issues at Orr High School erupted into shouting and drew the involvement of 27th Ward Ald. Walter Burnett, Jr. In addition to dropping students, the activists and students complained, the new administration is too strict, for example, suspending students for swearing.

Representatives from the school and the community group Blocks Together were set to meet again Monday. However, Blocks Together organizers are also demanding a meeting with Don Feinstein, executive director of the nonprofit that is leading the turn-around effort at the school, Academy for Urban School Leaders (AUSL).

Located in Humboldt Park, Orr is in the second year of the effort—a process in which most staff is replaced.

Blocks Together said they were leaked a list of 150 students whom security guards were supposedly told not to let through the door. Blocks Together youth organizer Ana Mercado said she thinks administrators are trimming the rolls to increase the school’s attendance figures.

But Sims said she dropped only 44 students who hadn’t been to school in a long time.

“I need to know exactly what number of students are in my building, not the number that are on the books,” Sims told the crowd on Saturday. “If the student comes back with the parent, if they meet with Dr. Bradley [the school’s director of student support services], they are re-enrolled. They’re not going to be able to go to work and miss 66 days and then expect the job to take them back.”

Some of the students were younger than age 17, says Cecile Carroll, Blocks Together co-director, and were dropped without the proper documentation. Under CPS policy, schools are required to complete a “Lost Child Report” for every student who is removed from enrollment because their whereabouts cannot be determined.

Several Orr staff members said Sims’ tough approach was the right one.

Before the meeting, Orr security guard Rosie Smith, who’s been at the school for nearly four decades, said she loves the newfound sense of order.

“To me, a lot of the [students] are getting the point,” she said. “They know there’s consequences, whatever you do.”

She said that administrators provide homework to students who have been suspended – and that many students are given in-school suspensions as an alternative.

Larry Potts, a Youth Guidance staff member who works as Orr’s community resource coordinator, told the group that he has “never seen Orr any better than it is right now.”

“A lot of the things [the administrators] do, have to be done. Orr is on the way to becoming the best school on the West Side,” he said.

Another key point of contention at the meeting was the automatic suspensions for profanity.

“If they hear you cursing, you automatically get suspended,” said Orr student Edward Ward, 18. “It seems as if it’s a zero-tolerance policy. We’re not saying don’t discipline them, we’re saying, take the proper steps … talk with them.”

Student Brittany Cannon, 18, added: “It’s so much easier to say, ‘You’re cursing – two days,’ than to ask, ‘What’s wrong, why are you cursing?’”

The students also charged that staff swear with impunity.

Sims responded that she would look into the problems on the staff. “I cannot tolerate, and I will not tolerate, disrespect in my building,” she said. “If they brought that issue to me, I would reprimand my staff.”

But she added that she had clearly laid out her expectations for students.

“I told them there’s no cursing; I even gave them examples of disrespectful body language,” she said. “Other administrators told me, ‘We don’t send our best students to Orr, it’s a dumping ground.’ Well, it’s a new day. It has sent a wakeup message to our students, that it’s not acceptable.”

Marvin Bradley, director of student support services at the school, said that swearing is one of only three infractions that results in an automatic suspension. The other two are drug use and fighting.

“The suspension is going to happen, but there is [also] a conversation,” he said.

Saturday’s event also highlighted the challenges Orr has faced with tracking down truant students and implementing restorative justice, two promises that Blocks Together organizers say AUSL made before the turnaround.

“We have so many letters coming back [as being sent to the] wrong address, [and] wrong phone numbers,” Bradley said. “We want them in school, but we can’t afford [to track them down]. We don’t have the funding.”

He said that at one point earlier this year, 60 percent of the students on the school’s rolls were chronically absent.

But Carroll said administrators promised to hire truant officers and take extra steps to track down missing students.  “[Don Feinstein] committed to us that he’d exhaust all those resources for keeping a relationship with those parents,” she said, even when families’ phone numbers and addresses changed.

Implementing a peer jury program has been another challenge, said math teacher Cy Hendrickson. The program is currently up and running, but it doesn’t have the capacity to take all the cases that now come its way.

“Part of avoiding these suspensions is going to be restorative justice, and increasing the capacity of peer jury,” Hendrickson said. “[But] until this year, with the arrival of Dr. Bradley, we didn’t have an administrator at the school with an open mind.”

Repeated turnover among administrators at the school has also made it difficult to sustain the program, said another math teacher, Buck Johnson.

“There are two approaches for dealing with students that are struggling for dominance at this school,” Mercado said. She offered to help school staff access training in restorative justice strategies.

Meanwhile, Burnett struck a conciliatory tone. “We want to make suggestions, but we cannot tell the principal how to run the school,” he said. “We just lost the [previous] principal at Orr because they didn’t think he was doing well enough.”

From the Washington Post:

The American Psychological Association put together a task force to research the effectiveness of zero-tolerance disciplinary policies, and the panel issued a report titled, “Are Zero Tolerance Policies Effective in the Schools? An Evidentiary Review and Recommendations,” published in the December 2008 American Psychologist.

It found that five common assumptions upon which zero-tolerance policies are often based are wrong. Here are the assumptions and what the report says is actually true:

ASSUMPTION #1: School violence is at a crisis level and increasing, thus necessitating forceful, no-nonsense strategies for violence prevention.

REALITY: Although any level of violence and disruption is unacceptable in schools and must be continually addressed in education, the evidence does not support an assumption that violence in schools is out of control or increasing. Incidents of critical and deadly violence remain a relatively small proportion of school disruptions, and the data have consistently indicated that school violence and disruption have remained stable, or even decreased somewhat, since approximately 1985.

ASSUMPTION #2: Through the provision of mandated punishment for certain offenses, zero tolerance increases the consistency of school discipline and thereby the clarity of the disciplinary message to students.

REALITY: Consistency, often defined as treatment integrity or fidelity, is an important criterion in the implementation of any behavioral intervention. There is no evidence, however, that zero tolerance has increased the consistency of school discipline. Rates of suspension and expulsion vary widely across schools and school districts and this variation appears to be due as much to characteristics of schools and school personnel (e.g., disciplinary philosophy, quality of school governance) as to the behavior or attitudes of students.

ASSUMPTION #3: Removal of students who violate school rules will create a school climate more conducive to learning for those students who remain.

REALITY: Although the assumption is strongly intuitive, data on a number of indicators of school climate have shown the opposite effect; that is, that schools with higher rates of school suspension and expulsion appear to have less satisfactory ratings of school climate and less satisfactory school governance structures, and to spend a disproportionate amount of time on disciplinary matters. Perhaps more importantly, recent research indicates a negative relationship between the use of school suspension and expulsion and schoolwide academic achievement, even when controlling for demographics such as socioeconomic status.

Although such findings do not demonstrate causality, it becomes difficult to argue that zero tolerance creates more positive school climates when its use is associated with more negative achievement outcomes.

ASSUMPTION #4: The swift and certain punishments of zero tolerance have a deterrent effect upon students, thus improving overall student behavior and discipline.

REALITY: Rather than reducing the likelihood of disruption, however, school suspension in general appears to predict higher future rates of misbehavior and suspension among those students who are suspended. In the long term, school suspension and expulsion are moderately associated with a higher likelihood of school dropout and failure to graduate on time.

ASSUMPTION #5: Parents overwhelmingly support the implementation of zero tolerance policies to ensure the safety of schools, and students feel safer knowing that transgressions will be dealt with in no uncertain terms.

REALITY: The data regarding this assumption are mixed and inconclusive. Media accounts and some survey results suggest that parents and the community react strongly in favor of increased disciplinary punishments if they fear that their children’s safety is at stake. On the other hand, communities surrounding schools often react highly negatively if they perceive that students’ right to an education is being threatened. Although some students appear to make use of suspension or expulsion as an opportunity to examine their own behavior, the available evidence also suggests that students in general regard school suspension and expulsion as ineffective and unfair.



By Mariame Kaba (cross-posted at Chicago Taskforce on Violence against Girls Blog)

I was stunned to read about the case of a high school senior in Mississippi who was suspended and sent to an alternative school for 5 weeks for writing a rap song and posting it on his Facebook page. This would be bad enough without knowing anything else about the incident. It is another example of harsh school disciplinary policies that students are consistently subjected to across the U.S. However upon further examination, your outrage will no doubt increase.

Taylor Bell, 18, wrote a song (on his own time and not at school) called “PSK The Truth Need To Be Told.” The young man explained that:

he wrote the song after he “learned from several female students at Itawamba (his school) that two athletic coaches were engaging in harmful conduct towards female students, including but not limited to, flirting with female students and inappropriate contact with intimate body parts of female students.”

For exposing this truth, Mr. Bell was suspended from school for 5 weeks. He says he wrote and recorded the song because he was “outraged.”

He adds: “The song vaguely reference the two athletic coaches accused of the misconduct and describes the misconduct told to him by the female students. Mr. Bell also metaphorically warned that the public might retaliate against the coaches for this conduct.”

As someone who is consistently lamenting the fact that too few men are allies to women who experience violence, I am incensed at how this young man has been treated by the school system. He posted his song on a Facebook page that could only be accessed by his personal friends and pre-approved people on January 3rd. He was called before a disciplinary hearing twelve days later.

At the hearing, “The song was played for the disciplinary committee. At the hearing, Mr. Bell gave the school officials copies of letters from female students verifying the statements made in the song.”

Bell says the committee found that his song “did not constitute a direct threat and instead amounted to harassment and intimidation of school teachers. The disciplinary committee recommended a seven-day suspension and five weeks at Itawamba Alternative School. To this point, it does not appear as if the school officials have done any investigation into the statements from the female students.”

The school board approved the punishment of a seven day suspension and five weeks of alternative school.

Mr. Bell has decided to “sue his principal, superintendent and school board, claiming he was unconstitutionally punished for writing and recording a rap song, on his own time, off campus, and posting it on his Facebook page.”

Bell says the defendants punished him for constitutionally protected speech. He seeks reinstatement to his regular classes, wants records of the incident expunged, and wants the defendants enjoined “from enforcing the school disciplinary code against students for expression that takes place outside of the school or school-sponsored activities.”

Good for you Taylor! Thank you for being an ally to your female friends! We should all be applauding the actions of this young man rather than pushing him out of school for speaking truth to power.

You can read the full article here.