Right to scrutinise southern school discipline

Schools need the capacity to stand down, suspend or even exclude students. Sometimes that’s what’s needed to keep the environment safe, to address disruptions to other students’ ability to learn, and to reinforce clear and fair boundaries.

But these measures must be seen not purely as a corrective or protective actions.

Each case is an inherent acknowledgment of some level of failure up to that point.

So it’s particularly concerning that the extent to which Southland students have been stood down or suspended in recent years has been climbing so steeply above the national average.

Quite rightly, the Ministry of Education is looking into why our province by 2018 had rate of 42 stand downs per 1000, compared to the average 25.5.

By the Ministry’s account, our principals often use stand-downs as a cooling off strategy. In itself this sounds reasonable but we need to remember what so much of this het-up behaviour entailed – bullying, violence or substance abuse.

These, as Southland Secondary Principals’ Association chairman Jarlath Kelly rightly says, are serious behaviour issues. And the cases where the harmful behaviour continued to the point of either suspension (requiring Board of Trustees approval for the student to return) or possibly exclusion (expulsion, in the old parlance) was 3.7 per 1000.

That’s more than double the national average of 1.5.

None of this necessarily means that southern schools are on a hair-trigger compared with their northern counterparts. The thought that they may be dealing with behaviours that are themselves worse than the national average is itself an unappealing one, though if this is the reality then the sooner we know it the better.

For its part the ministry has signalled that it believes ‘‘professional development’’ may be in order, notably when it comes to the latest restorative practices.

The suggestion would seem to be that some of our teachers have some catching up to do. Again, this is not a notion to be dismissed out of hand, any more than it should be uncritically embraced.

There are several reasons not to zoom in too ardently on the view that schools are necessarily, let alone uniformly, at fault. For one thing, they do have their distinct characters, and this can mean they have individual weaknesses as well as strengths.

Moreover, there is so often a gap between what is expected of schools and what they are resourced for.

As Post Primary Teachers’ Association chairman Bill Claridge says, they’re often under-funded for the support and counselling capabilities we might want, or expect, them to have. The Government has been addressing this in some areas, but to whatever extent this may start to help the situation, the 2018 figures don’t capture.

Neither should we conclude that this is an issue of inadequate parent raising more-troubled kids and schools being expected to perform miraculous transformations on all the wrong messages the students have grown up with, and that solutions rest with those parents, end of story.

Students, families, schools, communities, government. All have a stake in the quality and outcomes of our education system – and all potentially stand accountable when things go wrong.

The stand-down rates suggest in Southland, something has been. Until the picture, complex as it may be, becomes clearer, none of us can confidently apportion blame or, more importantly, play our parts in improvement on this issue. Hopefully the ministry scrutiny won’t be too narrow.

‘‘Professional development’’ may be in order, notably when it comes to the latest restorative practices.