Reflections: Then and NowSubmitted by Frank Murphy, Oct. 21, 2010
The School District of Philadelphia has launched a new initiative to improve the school climate at 46 focus schools. An editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer described this project as … “a much needed attempt to change the climate in schools where troublemakers have been allowed to run amok…”
This choice of words conjures up an image of schools that are dangerous and out of control, where children do as they please. It reinforces the misguided perceptions held by many people who have never stepped into a Philadelphia public school. These misconceptions generally surmise that most of our students are poorly behaved and anti social individuals, and that school personnel are lax and apathetic to creating orderly and safe schools.
There are indeed serious safety issues at these schools. The amount of incidents reported by the school administrators of 25 of these 46 schools has resulted in having the NCLB label of “persistently dangerous” being attached to their schools. But like moment-in-time standardized test scores, these numbers hardly tell the full story of what is taking place at a particular school.
It is not exceedingly difficult for a school to qualify as being persistently dangerous. Look at Northeast High School. In the 2009 school year, it acquired the dubious title of persistently dangerous after reporting 20 serious incidents during that school year. There were 3,100 students enrolled in the school. The students involved in these incidents represent less than 1% of the student population. Does this sound like students are being allowed to run muck as stated in the Inquirer? If this particular school was dangerously out of control, one could hardly imagine that the School Reform Commission would have given permission for the filming of Tony Danza’s show Teach at this location.
Again I repeat that there is no doubt that serious incidents of violence do occur in our city’s schools. What I do question is how this problem is characterized as a result of the failure of teachers and principals to properly manage and operate our schools. Perhaps the causes of violence and disruptions in our city public school are more complex than those communicated in the media’s narrative.
I know what violence in a school looks like. I have been a witness to the worst cases of the misbehavior of children. As an elementary school principal, I have dealt with children who have kicked out glass windows, overturned classroom bookshelves, thrown furniture at their classmates and teacher and seriously assaulted other students and school staff. More times than I would like to recount, I have been the person who has been responsible for dealing with the aftermath of the disturbing and scary outburst of troubled students.
The most dangerous and unpredictable of these students have been between the ages of 6 and 10. School critics who have little if any experience working closely with children will scoff at this notion. They don’t have any idea of what it takes to stop a swinging, kicking, biting, adrenaline-surging, enraged child from trying to seriously injure another child. In many cases, these children suffer from serious, often untreated, mental health disorders. The effects of their behavior impact negatively on every child in their classrooms and spill over into the hallways, lunchroom and playground. It is amazing how many confrontations that they can have with other children during the course of one day. Unfortunately, successfully addressing the root causes of their mental health issues is very often beyond the purview of teachers and administrators.
A little more than ten years ago, district personnel worked in partnership with the Department of Human Service to create new strategies to deal with these troubled youth. The position of Consultation and Education (C&E) specialist was created. Contracts were given to qualified non-profit social service providers who hired and then supervised the people for these positions. The primary objective of the C&E was to assist parents in obtaining the mental health services that their children required. At the time, this represented a radical rethinking of how mental health services could be provided to the children and families most in need of them. The C&E acted as a case manager who negotiated the maze of various health providers on the behalf of the children and their families. It was a great idea. But in practice this program encountered barriers that had not been anticipated. The three primary roadblocks that the C&E specialist encountered were:
- parents would not give permission for their children to participate;
- many parents who did give permission failed to follow up on appointments;
- and frequently a family would move out of the school before the intake process was complete.
The end result was that troubled children who did receive limited or incomplete treatment, continued to create havoc in the school. It most cases, relief to the school community would come only when the family relocated to another neighborhood.
The mobility of these children and their families is amazingly high. Between kindergarten and eighth grade, they might attend half dozen elementary schools. For many of these students, treatment doesn’t finally come until after they engage in a serious incident that results in their arrest. Often times it is the juvenile justice system and not schools that force parental cooperation in obtaining the appropriate social and mental health services for their children.
This certainly is a more complex narrative than the version the media offers to explain serious school violence. To approach the safety problems of schools by declaring that you are going to “lay down the law and throw the trouble makers out” is just an easy way out of having to find real solutions to difficult problems.
Most of the schools that have been included in this intervention project are high schools. The students in these schools responsible for much of the disruptions to the school climate did not suddenly become behavior problems when they entered high school. Their disciplinary history reaches far back to their early days as an elementary student.
I hope that the resources of this new school climate initiative will be used to address in a meaningful manner the needs of these troubled youth and their struggling families.