While there weren’t many action items at the June 17 Healdsburg school board meeting, the board discussed the introduction of the new K-5 discipline guide for parents and teachers.
Healdsburg Elementary School (HES) Principal Jeff Franey and Fitch Mountain elementary campus (FMC) Principal Erika McGuire presented to the board the first reading of the new K-5 discipline guide.
The 25-page guide discusses the responsibilities of students, parents, teachers and administrators, and provides information and disciplinary support in the form of a multi-tiered support system (MSS) pyramid. It also lays out protocols for dealing with minor offenses, such as failure to follow instructions, as well as a matrix of possible alternatives to suspensions for more major infractions.
“This document we put together to kind of encapsulate everything that we are doing,” McGuire said.
The in-depth document was born out of the request of many elementary parents who voiced concern regarding student behavior expectations and managing discipline in classrooms.
Parents brought up their concerns and addressed the need for change at many school board meetings, most recently at the March 11 meeting.
“The current climate of the learning environments in our elementary school classrooms both at HES and FMC is of great concern and the current discipline or restorative justice procedures are not cutting it. I personally know of 10 families who have already left or are leaving the district due to unsafe or disruptive classrooms,” one parent said at the March 11 meeting. “It amazes me how much talk there is always of our district shrinking due to families not being able to afford to live in Healdsburg, yet no one is talking about how much our district is shrinking due to families leaving to go to other schools because of the disruptive, chaotic and sometimes unsafe environments in our classrooms and playgrounds. In my course of subbing over the past four years I have seen first-hand that good teachers, great teachers, experienced teachers are burning out and are at their wits end over this topic. The issue needs to be addressed.”
Rose McAllister, a parent of two FMC fourth graders and an HES kindergartener said in the March meeting that she’s also personally observed continuous disruptive classroom behavior.
“In the past two years I have personally observed classroom behavior from our students that was consistently disruptive to learning. I believe that these problems are not limited to one classroom, one grade level, or one student. They are widespread and dysfunctional, cutting into student learning and creating profound stress for teachers and students alike,” McAllister said. “I strongly feel that our district should have a detailed policy in place that respects the learning, time and safety of all of the students and teachers and provides timely resources to support these policies. Too often sometimes quite serious situations have been treated by the district as ‘one-offs’ and from what I have observed with my own eyes, they are not ‘one-offs.’”
The new guide was modeled after the Petaluma City Schools’ elementary discipline guide and dialed down to incorporate Healdsburg-specific practices. It was also presented to each elementary school site governing council where it was given the “OK” from site councilmembers, according to McGuire.
“We know this is really big,” McGuire said of the detailed document. “The feedback we got though from both governing councils is that parents want an opportunity to look and see all of the details.”
She said the key components of the guide are the student, staff, parent and teacher expectations and the pyramid, which summarizes the support schools have for parents and teachers in regard to managing discipline and behavior.
Franey said of the guide, “I think the biggest part about it is that it does really lend itself to the social and emotional needs of our students.”
He said one of the reasons he likes the pyramid method, is because it shows the different tiers of intervention.
“That is what this is mainly about, it’s helping students understand and teaching students how to be in a social setting, how to treat one another, what it’s like to hold a conversation and play with one another,” he said.
Diane Conger, the director of student support services, said what she likes about the guide is when school administration is asked about the “Whys” or the “Hows” of discipline, the guide can clearly elaborate on them. She added that there needs to be a more parent-friendly version.
“It is a fine line where it (information) is too little or not enough. Some parents will want it all and some parents will want a snapshot,” Conger said.
School board President Donna Del Rey said in that sense, it is a very detailed guide, but was confused on the correlation between the pyramid, the “core of it all” and the minor and major infractions and the different levels of severity.
“As a parent, I didn’t know how to navigate that,” Del Rey said, noting that while it is good to be detailed, she doesn’t know how this would help answer parent questions.
Del Rey was also confused as to why the Ed Code was included when that does not apply to K-8.
“A lot of this kind of willful defiance and disruption often comes in an elementary campus but we can’t suspend and we often get questioned about why we can’t suspend, so I personally thought it was important to include the language that students can’t be suspended but that there are other means of corrections for those behaviors, whereas if that same behavior is at a secondary you could suspend for, but we cannot suspend for defiance or class disruption,” McGuire said.
She added that they are going to make a “Cliff Notes” version of the guide with a link to the whole document and get it to parents at the beginning of the school year. It will also be available in Spanish.
School board Vice President Aracely Romo-Flores, said she’d like to see a monitoring system for student behavior.
“How are we monitoring students being sent into the office, who’s being sent into the office, so that we can look. Is it one specific area of school, is it a group of students? There needs to be some monitoring and analysis of our data built into this so we can modify it or provide whatever resources we need to support those areas that are challenging our students,” Romo-Flores said.
McGuire said they have some form of data collection when referrals get entered into the Aeries grading system for instance, or when students do reflection sheets as part of the restorative process.
Romo-Flores also suggested adding a flow chart for parents that describes how parents may bring up a complaint or a concern, “So we don’t have to get to the level of a formal complaint.”
McAllister, who previously voiced her concerns, returned to Wednesday’s meeting to thank the board for thoroughly addressing the issue.
“Thank you for raising this up from the site governing council level to address it so thoroughly. I wanted to point out that the genesis of this discussion came from many instances of parents complaining about behavior not being addressed in ways that they thought were adequate to make the classroom environment safe and joyful for the majority of children in those individual classrooms over the course of multiple years. This document is one piece in what needs to be a cultural shift, which I hear a lot of commitment to that shift,” she said.
The guide will return to the next school board meeting on June 29 for formal board approval.
