Stop Saying We Can't Suspend Because 'Home Is the Problem
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder dismantles the argument that schools shouldn't suspend students because their home environment is bad.
Key Takeaways
- Students go home every day - If home is too dangerous for a suspended student, it's too dangerous every night and weekend too
- Suspension isn't about home - It's about protecting the school community during the school day
- Don't conflate school discipline with social services - If a student's home is unsafe, that's a CPS issue, not a reason to avoid discipline
Transcript
We can have peaceful, productive classrooms again if we're willing to send kids home when they are violent or disruptive.
And I'm not talking about students with disabilities, but students who are just acting up so much that teaching and learning can't take place, that school's not safe.
We can get that safety and that order and that learning back if we're willing to send kids home.
But a lot of people object.
This is the number one comment I get whenever I talk about suspending students.
Oh, their home is not safe.
Their home is traumatizing.
Their home environment is why they're acting the way they are.
If you send them home, that's just going to make the problem worse.
I have to ask myself, and I've asked a lot of people who've commented this, where do you think kids go at night?
After school is over for the day, where do you think they go?
They go home.
They go, for better or for worse, they go home and live with their family the other, you know, majority of their time that they're not in school.
And we're only in school half the year, you know, 180 days.
We're only in school, you know, seven, eight hours a day at most.
So already, students are spending most of their time with their families.
And the idea that we should never suspend a student because that will cause them to spend...
slightly more time with their family just same as if we had a snow day like that's just ridiculous to me that we can't send a student home because their family is so bad for them and here's where i call the bluff here's where i call the bluff if you think a family is so bad for a kid that you wouldn't even send them home so they could spend eight more hours with their with their own family you need to call cps on that family if those concerns are real prove that they're real by calling CPS on that family and saying, I need to report an unsafe home environment for a child.
And I'm guessing you're not going to do that.
I'm guessing it's not actually that bad.
You just don't think the family is that great.
And I get it, right?
We have lots of students who we wish we could make their life better.
We wish their parents could maybe set a better example.
Maybe their parents need to take them to therapy together.
Maybe there are just things going on that we wouldn't wish on any of our students and we can't fix, and yet they fall short of that threshold of a mandatory CPS report.
We are mandatory reporters.
If we really have that kind of concern, we need to report it.
So I just have to call that bluff and say in all these cases where people say, oh, you can't send them home, that's why they are the way they are.
It's just going to make things worse.
No, it's not, because a snow day doesn't do that, right?
Summer might, you know, summer's a long time to spend away from school, so there might be a little bit of that, but you can't argue that it's unsafe to send a child home and then send them home at 3.30 p.m.
anyway.
Let me know what you think.