Fish Prizes for All!
I’m sure that he was just following procedure…
Our new plan to get students to do the right thing while at school is called the “Positive Behavior Support Plan.” It currently has no guidelines for consequences for negative behavior, only rewards for good behavior. Furthermore, since the Sixth Grade students are running wild, they have a “Student of the Week” assembly, where the various students who have been nominated are honored on a weekly basis. In addition, we have the “Caught Being Great” program, where a teacher can give a card to a student, and those cards are put in the office. A drawing happens, and the winners get “free dress” for a day. That’s a day without school uniforms.
Under this new setup, even the rules are only stated positively. I am encouraged to not comment to young people that they are late, but instead to reward them for being on time, for example.
Our campus, meanwhile, is descending into madness.
Ironically, the most important elements for me are very basic. The “free dress” was a huge mistake. I’m generally opposed to school uniforms, but we have our school in an area where safety is a strong consideration, on the border of conflict between gang sets. With the uniform, we can immediately and quickly identify an outsider, because they are not in fact, in our uniform. That’s a huge safety advantage.
Further…many of our students would prefer to actively wear gang related clothing under free dress conditions…making it harder to determine, for many staff, if there were a problem in the event of a safety situation. Considering the number of times a year we have an active shooter in the neighborhood, and have to lockdown campus, this is a HUGE deal.
At this point, the IDEA of free dress, and lack of uniform enforcement by Pledge LA and Darth, has led to approximately ten percent of our students being out of uniform on any given day. Many of those students, in turn, are actively representing organized crime factions on our campus. On the bright side, I am assured that continuing to focus on the “positive elements” of the future gang members will reorganize their focus back on school.
I wouldn’t teach in that environment if I didn’t think that students who were flirting with organized crime as an option couldn’t be saved. After fifteen years though, I know its not in letting them wear colors, or giving them some kind of certificate of recognition. There’s an honesty of approach with those kinds of young people that is needed. They know already the challenges of poverty, and are gravitating toward the thing that shows them, in real time, the highest level of reward (financial) with the highest level of immediacy, and least level of mental work. That’s why gangs are appealing in the first place…the sense of community, belonging, and the idea that you can produce in some way.
A school, to function, needs to be strong about removing all elements of that lifestyle from its campus, in an “out of sight, out of mind” mentality. Colors need to be banned, and tagging needs to be erased immediately. Both of these things are not happening any longer, and the level of violence and crime on campus has increased notably.
For a school to be safe, you have to draw a line in the sand. You have to have rules, consequences, and follow through. There have to be limits. That’s part of preparing people for nine to five jobs in the first place.
I’m not saying we can have rewards and assemblies. We should. I think that was a great idea in fact. What you can’t do, is have rewards to the exclusion of consequences. It’s like pretending you don’t have cancer, and assuming that it will go away if you do. We all know that doesn’t work.
The art, of course, is about that kind of Bizarro-logic. I decided to draw different heat vision goggles for our hero…so I guess she has more than one pair. Really, I just thought that Cyclops’ old visor from the 80’s would look cooler in the panel that I was thinking of. To my credit, I think it does.
Tales of Adequacy! 