Going Back Old School

A few years back there was an 11 girl who was bullied in a Texas school every day of the week relentlessly. One day she came to class and all of the other kids started making fun of her and even telling her that she smelled. This really hurt her feelings and the next day she came into class wearing her mother’s perfume to cover her bad odor, according to her class mates. At this point the teacher tells her that she is interrupting class because she is wearing too much perfume and takes her to the principal’s office, not to be suspended, but to be ticketed by the schools police.

That is how students in the state of Texas have been disciplined since the zero tolerance laws were passed in the mid-1990s. This zero tolerance law was passed because Texas Legislators felt that changing the way schools disciplined students would have a more positive outcome on them and take the that responsibility off of the teachers, but in fact it had the opposite effect. The only people who were seriously affected by these laws were the parents of the students. Expensive fines for horseplay, cursing and putting on perfume went from $50 to $500 for each offense and the parents are the ones paying these fines. Campus police for Texas school districts wrote an average of 275,000 tickets a year and most students are repeatedly ticketed and never learned their lesson.

There is good news for future students of Texas school districts. A new program known as Suspend Kids to School was started about 2 years ago in the Waco Independent School District as a pilot program. It was initiated by the governor’s office to hopefully be a model for the rest of the school districts in the state. Through this program, teachers are being trained to better manage their classrooms so that the disturbance may be handled in the school instead of in the criminal courts. Since this program started the number of Class C misdemeanors dropped 42% in the second year of the programs existence. The number of students referred to alternative schools has also dropped dramatically, 104 students were referred the first year and only 22 the second. It is obvious that the steps we are taking as a state to improve our schools are very positive. I feel the more we go back to the way things used to be and change the ratio of students to teachers, things will continue to get better. We need to train our teachers to hold each other and their students accountable for their actions.  This will be the key to success. Schools are meant to train our kids for the big bad world, and in this world, being accountable for our own actions is half the battle.