When In-School Suspension Is Full
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses why filling up in-school suspension is an administrative problem, not a reason to burden teachers or lower behavior expectations.
Key Takeaways
- Protect Teacher Prep Time - Planning periods are part of teaching, not a general-use staffing resource for administrative gaps.
- Administration Must Create Capacity - If ISS is full, leaders need to expand the system so consequences can still be enforced.
- Hold the Line on Expectations - Teachers should not be told to stop writing referrals if students are being sent out for legitimate infractions.
- Discipline Systems Should Scale - Behavior support and consequences need to operate at the level required to keep teaching and learning going.
- Don’t Shift the Burden to Teachers - Asking teachers to staff ISS during prep undermines instruction and reflects a failure of administration.
Transcript
Teachers, in-school suspension is full, so don't write up any more students for minor infractions. This was the email that went out to teachers in this particular school, and apparently the teachers pushed back because they were quickly updated with the announcement that, good news, a second in-school suspension classroom has been opened, but bad news, you have to staff it on your prep period. This is the kind of thing that is really a failure of administration, right? The job of administration is to make sure that teachers can teach. And that includes having their prep period. It includes not having disruptions during class, you know, dealing with the discipline issues that come up, and having a consequence and a system of consequences that doesn't require the teacher to stop teaching, and covering That system, covering that in-school suspension without taking up teachers' planning periods.
Because I believe teachers' planning periods are part of their teaching, right? It is part of what you need as a teacher to be ready for the day, to have time to grade papers, to have time to make copies. We can't just treat that as a school resource. Teacher prep time is not a school resource. It is a teacher resource to do the job that you're hired to do. And, like, yes, there are emergencies.
I understand we all have to cover classes. Sometimes there is just no way around that. But there should be a good system that does not routinely involve taking up that teacher's prep time. And I think the idea here that teachers are just writing too many infractions and, oh, ISS is full, so too bad. No, we need to hold the line on expectations, and if the number of behaviors goes up, yeah, the number of kids in ISS is going to go up, and maybe some of those kids should have actually been sent home. You know, we don't know the specifics here, but this needs to be a system that operates at the necessary scale so that teaching and learning can continue.
We can't just say to teachers, oh, too many kids in ISS. Well, like, Are we sending kids to ISS for the right reasons? If so, there's no such thing as too many. We have to hold the line on behavior and not just lower our standards whenever it's springtime and kids start acting up, as they do, especially in middle school, in the spring. So, let me know what you think about this. How do we scale ISS as needed?
How do we make sure that teachers can teach and not have to deal with stuff like this? Let me know what you think.