Alternatives To Suspension

The concept of Restorative Practices in schools is fairly new. There are challenges in the early stages of anything new, and Restorative Practices is no exception. The greatest challenge is refuting the idea that Restorative Practices should replace traditional consequences and punishment should be eliminated. Ideally, this makes sense, but realistically, it cannot work. There will always be a need for traditional consequences in schools because there will always be situations that require us to use strategies such as in-school or out-of-school suspension. The key word to remember here is strategies. Suspension is a strategy, not a solution, and a strategy is derived from an intended goal.

This training will provide participants with:

  • a Discipline Decision-Making Process that helps ensure decision makers are making thoughtful and thorough decisions when addressing students who need to be held accountable for their behavior.

  • a framework for creating Highly Effective Accountability that is designed to change the adverse behavior while maintaining the idea of some traditional consequences.

  • how in-school suspension can be modified to minimize the amount of time a student is removed from the learning environment by strategically working to change the underlying behaviors

  • specific alternatives to in-school suspension that can be effective in minimizing the need for traditional in-school suspension

  • how educators can partner with parents in the accountability process to change adverse behavior

  • specific interventions that seamlessly allow parents to be a part of the accountability process

WHAT TO EXPECT

FOCUS #1: HIGHLY EFFECTIVE ACCOUNTABILITY
Although Restorative Practices is necessary, it can be just as flawed as traditional consequences if executed in isolation. Restorative Practices focuses on explicitly teaching behavior to students in an effort to change undesired behavior, whereas traditional consequences are used to punish for an inappropriate behavior when we believe students should have known that what they were doing was wrong. Our goal in both instances is accountability, and the path to accountability in schools can be achieved only by making restorative practices and traditional consequences work hand in hand.

FOCUS #2: ALTERNATIVES TO IN-SCHOOL SUSPENSION (ISS)
If we're being honest, in-school suspension has some benefits. By and large, most students resent being assigned in-school suspension primarily because of the social isolation. Most administrators can corroborate this from firsthand experiences of students pleading for out of school suspension instead of in-school suspension. Many students would prefer to serve their punishment at home rather than being isolated from their peers at school. The greatest flaw of ISS is that you are removing the student from the learning environment and it is relatively impossible to replicate the learning environment you are removing the student from. We convince ourselves that we are still educating these students by providing them with work from their teachers and a staff member in the room, usually a paraprofessional, to "teach" students as needed. In reality, the overuse of ISS serves as a temporary solution that often compounds the underlying problem which eventually creates irreparable harm to the school. We have to find alternatives that extract the benefits of ISS but also compensates where ISS is deficient.

FOCUS #3: PARTNERING WITH PARENTS TO HOLD STUDENTS ACCOUNTABLE
One thing that almost everyone can agree on is parenting today is drastically different than it was years ago. Many educators believe parents of students today are responsible for why we are currently seeing such a widespread of adversarial behavior in schools. You can debate whether we have a parent problem or societal problem in our country but one thing that we do know is that pointing fingers or playing the blame game isn't going to solve this problem. In fact, one could argue that the lack of trust between schools and parents is the primary barrier preventing educators from getting a handle on this problem. Leveraging partnerships with parents is paramount if educators have any hope at finding solutions to the behavior problems in our schools today. This can only be accomplished if we can convince parents to partner with us to work together in the best interest of their child rather than act as their kids' defense attorneys as many parents currently do.