Students Take Aim At Suspensions

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by Melissa Bailey | May 5, 2010 11:43 am

(6) Comments | Commenting has been closed | E-mail the Author

Posted to: Schools, School Reform

Over 100 students got suspended at Wilbur Cross High School in January for using iPods and cell phones, Dawn Washington noted to a group of her peers.

“Do you think this is too extreme?” she asked.

“We do,” she said, answering her own question. “We believe that suspensions should be consistent across all schools.”

Washington, a ninth-grader at Co-Op high school, made the remarks at a school-themed open mic session at the downtown public library on Elm Street Monday evening. She was speaking on behalf of a new student group called “Youth UnleashED: Students United For School Change,” which is affiliated with Your Place Youth Center in Newhallville.

The group is made up of students ages 13 to 19, from high schools across the city. They got together in October with the purpose of having student input in New Haven’s nascent school change campaign.

On Monday, dozens of teens and adults filed into a basement meeting room at the public library for the group’s second open mic session.

Students opened the floor to anyone to come forward and perform poetry, song and freestyle rap.

Nollysha Canteen, a sophomore at Hillhouse High, read a poem that touched on growing up with an absent father. Sabir Abdussabur rapped, in high-speed a capella, for over four minutes about his world views.

Between performances, the teen leaders ran public service announcements on their topic of top concern: How to improve the schools. Gloria Washington, a sophomore at Hillhouse, took the crowd through a slide show of unsanitary conditions in the schools. (Click on the play arrow at the top of this story to see all three in action.)

The slides showed dirt gathering in a hallway, a toilet that had been out of service for months, and a few slides of unappetizing food.

“This meat is most likely leftover,” she charged, as another slide flashed across the screen. “And so is this one.”

“Aww, c’mon, I eat those sandwiches,” protested one teen.

The group passed out a list of priorities for school change. They listed clean buildings and sanitary food as top concerns.

“School discipline should be consistent and fair,” the document also reads. “Out-of-school suspensions should be avoided!”

Students also suggested they be included in decisions about school change. “We should have a say in the hiring of high school principals and school reform efforts,” they wrote.

Interestingly, some of the concerns they articulated were shared by their own principals on a recent survey that offered feedback to the school district’s central office.

“Our building has suffered from the consistent cutback of custodial positions, and currently does not have enough staff to adequately clean and maintain the entire building on a daily basis” one anonymous principal wrote. “One entire floor of a 200,000 square-foot building has been designated as a ‘rotating overtime’ zone and in order to address this, the overall cleanliness and appearance of the building has deteriorated significantly.”

Principals also said they needed more guidance from central office in how to discipline kids. School officials responded that they’re still implementing a new code of conduct that will make discipline more consistent; click here to read a story about that.

Student organizer Milena Yamada Souto said the group has been meeting weekly and aims to have a voice in school reform. Most students don’t know what school reform is, but they have solutions for how to change their schools, her group argued.

“We want youth to be part of addressing the issues,” she said.

School district spokeswoman Michelle Wade said she’d welcome the students’ input.

“The reform effort is all about collaboration, transparency and inclusiveness,” she said. “So we’d love for the students to have a voice in this.”

Comments

posted by: streever on May 5, 2010 2:28pm

Great job kids!

I’m glad to see you speaking up & being actively engaged. Don’t let the administrators work any less hard than you and your teachers.

I have been told by Wilbur Cross students & teachers that there are NINE vice-principals, who mainly are concerned with discipline. They make excellent salaries, and if they can’t stay for after-school detention once a week they need to be fired. End of story. It is simply unacceptable that their only discipline is to send kids him. Kids need to be IN school to benefit from the education reform.

Laziness and ineptitude should not be tolerated any more. Administrators, do not leave these kids alone. If a kid misbehaves, after-school detention should be first step. I received one after school detention in elementary school & made sure to never get another one.

posted by: ~glo~ on May 5, 2010 2:55pm

We did a wonderful job at doing this! I am so proud of youth UnleashED!!! You guys are the best!! But i noticed that the author wrote my sister’s name instead of mine for showing the slide show…

posted by: Threefifths on May 5, 2010 5:26pm

The students need to know why you can use a cell phone during a lock down. A police detective friend of mine send this to me.

Cell Phones Can Detract From School Safety & Crisis Preparedness
Cell phones have been used for calling in bomb threats to schools and, in many communities, cell calls cannot be traced by public safety officials.
Student use of cell phones could potentially detonate a real bomb if one is actually on campus.
Cell phone use by students can hamper rumor control and, in doing so, disrupt and delay effective public safety personnel response.
Cell phone use by students can impede public safety response by accelerating parental response to the scene of an emergency during times when officials may be attempting to evacuate students to another site.
Cell phone systems typically overload during a real major crisis (as they did during the Columbine tragedy, WTC attacks, etc.), and usage by a large number of students at once could add to the overload and knock out cell phone systems quicker than may normally occur. Since cell phones may be a backup communications tool for school administrators and crisis teams, widespread student use in a crisis could thus eliminate crisis team emergency communications tools in a very short period of critical time

You can read the rest.

http://www.schoolsecurity.org/trends/cell_phones.html

Cell phones and I pods can be used to detonated a bomb.

http://www.cellantenna.com/CJAM/threatofcellphones.htm

This is why you are told when the school is on locke down don’t use any electrical devices in case it may be a bomb.

posted by: The Professor on May 6, 2010 9:26am

It seems like suspending kids for using cell phones and ipods in class only compounds the problem—the strategy basically boils down to telling kids, “you’re not paying enough attention in school, and to prove to you that you’re not paying enough attention in school, we’re going to keep you from coming to school for a period of time!” Even in the case of detention, the message it sends is “you’re not engaged in the learning process, so to show you that you should be engaged in the learning process, we’re going to stick you in a room at this school for a while, and in that room, you will sit and do absolutely nothing!”

Basically, these punishments seem to only reinforce the problems of disinterest and detachment that lead to the punishments in the first place.

For the money we pay those VPs, maybe one or two could focus on developing more constructive modes of behavior modification. For example, a student caught on a cell phone during a lesson on the civil rights movement might be required to watch an hour of “eyes on the prize” and write a page about what he learned. Or pick a topic related to the civil rights movement and write about it. Or spend an hour talking to the vice principal about Medgar Evers. Something, ANYTHING more constructive than sitting around at home playing video games for a day.

These kids have demonstrated that at least a few are intelligent and engaged. Why immediately jump to punishments that are aimed at either a) purely inflicting unpleasantness or b) removing them from a potentially engaging school setting?

posted by: Threefifths on May 6, 2010 10:47am

posted by: The Professor on May 6, 2010 9:26am
It seems like suspending kids for using cell phones and ipods in class only compounds the problem

I argee that you should not suspending kids for using cell phones and ipods in class.But they need to know the danger of using these devices if there is a lock down.

posted by: MilenaSouto on May 8, 2010 1:38pm

Well,If no one tells them why they shouldn’t use cell phones in school,how should they know?

School discipline should be consistent and fair among all students. Suspending a student for 3 days for using a cell phone or ipod without warning to parents or even explaining to the students why they are being suspended doesn’t help them at all. Studies show that out of school suspensions might increase involvement in juvenile justice system and lead to drop outs.

As youth, we need to be more informed and have a voice at our schools. We are not the issue, we want to be part of addressing issues.

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