Crime Is a Good Bright Line for Behavior That Can't Be Tolerated in Schools

Crime is a good bright line for schools when it comes to discipline.

And we've made a lot of efforts in recent years to cut down on unnecessary out-of-school suspensions and to get more fair about school discipline.

You know, we want kids to be in class.

We want kids to be in school learning.

But there are, of course, certain behaviors that make learning impossible for everybody if we tolerate them.

Yet a lot of schools have decided to go really far in the direction of not suspending students.

So I wanted to suggest kind of a rule of thumb for when we need to think very seriously about suspending students.

And that is crime, right?

We have every day in this country, we have crimes get committed in schools.

Those crimes include assault.

Those crimes include destruction of property.

Those crimes include lots of things that make learning impossible.

And yet school behavior has a much wider range, right?

There are lots of things that are not allowed in school that are not crimes, right?

Like it's not a crime to be disrespectful.

So do we have the opportunity to build relationships and use lower level consequences and do lots of things to keep kids in school, even if they are being disrespectful?

Yes, there's a big opportunity there.

But we have to not go too far with the scope of those opportunities and say, well, this kid punched somebody, but we really want them to spend more time in class learning.

So we're just going to kind of let that slide.

That's the kind of thinking that does not work because it turns school into some sort of special zone where the that prevent people from assaulting one another don't apply.

And I think we also need to look at crimes that are not necessarily against people.

Like even property crime like vandalism is not something that we should tolerate in schools.

And I've said in other videos that we lose credibility and people get scared.

Students get scared when they see their classroom environment get destroyed.

And like rightly so, destroying property is a crime and a lot of schools are really trying to get away from that type of thinking because their thinking is if we can just kind of ignore this for a minute and let the student calm down everybody can get back to learning but that doesn't really work we've lost credibility as a safe environment when we allow that to happen because in society we don't just allow people to destroy property and vandalize property and get away with it there's a test or a rule that i've heard called the walmart test or the mall test Like if you would get arrested for this at a store, we probably should not allow it in schools.

And yet every day schools are allowing property to be destroyed.

They're allowing students to be violent to one another.

They're allowing students to be violent to staff members.

And whether we're talking about general education, whether we're talking about students with disabilities, like no parent wants their kid to be exposed to crime at school.

No parent wants their kid to be exposed to violence at school.

No parent wants their kid to be exposed to the destruction of their classroom.

And we have to not give ourselves complicated excuses for allowing those kinds of things.

And I think when it comes to special education, you know, definitely there are disabilities that make it harder for kids to keep their behavior in a safe range, right?

And there are certain responsibilities that we have as educators and as school systems to support students and make sure that we're not putting them in situations where they can't succeed.

But I have not heard any parent of a student with a disability say, you know what?

I want my kid to get away with violence towards other people at school.

I want my kid to get away with crimes at school.

No.

None of us want that for our kids because we know they're not going to stay kids forever and they're not going to stay in the school environment forever.

And what we teach in the school environment needs to transfer well to outside the school environment.

So if you are hitting people all day at school and then you go to the store after school and get arrested for the same behavior, like something is off there.

So let me know what you think of this kind of rule of thumb of just thinking, what is a crime?

Okay, those are the things that we need to be suspending kids and having more severe out-of-school consequences for.

Let me know what you think about that rule of thumb.