‘Suspended’ students should still be coming to school

“We’re not going to give up,” Peter Rubenschuh told me.

This was a long time ago, back in 2006. Rubenschuh was principal at Forest Heights Collegiate in Kitchener. He had started some visionary programs, designed to help students who weren’t going to class, or were behaving badly.

At Forest Heights that day, I saw “credit recovery” at work. It was a separate room with a more relaxed atmosphere than regular classrooms, where students who had fallen behind were being helped to catch up.

There was also a program arranging for co-op work experience for teens with behaviour problems. There was extra counselling, too.

These ideas worked. In 2004, 37 students had dropped out of Forest Heights. A year later, with these programs in place, only five dropped out.

Over time, these resources for struggling and marginalized students — first put in place by Waterloo MPP Elizabeth Witmer when she was Education Minister a few years earlier — were established in every school.

It was a new way of thinking, which held that schools were there, not only for the universitybound high achievers, but also for the students who were “acting out” or who couldn’t keep up.

This attitude is clearly also part of the reason fewer students are being suspended now.

According to the Ministry of Education, the percentage of students suspended at the Waterloo Region District School Board fell to 2.24 per cent of all students in 2015-16, down from 3.87 per cent in 2008-09.

The local Catholic board has a heavier hand, suspending 3.09 per cent of students in 2015-16 which is also a decline from 5.83 per cent in 2008-09.

The provincial average for all boards is now 2.56 per cent, down from four per cent in 2008-9.

It is all great news. No one benefits when students act violently. or come to school high.

But we can and should push ahead even further.

Maybe removing students from school isn’t even the best way to handle bad behaviour. Instead, they should be in school, where there is help for them.

“Kids should be in school, learning,” says Rubenschuh, now a superintendent.

One Catholic high school, St. Benedict in Cambridge, took a giant step in this direction by getting “conflict resolution” training for teachers from a local non-profit agency, Community Justice Initiatives. Teachers learn to mediate disagreements between students, before a fight starts.

In addition, St. Benedict brings in a worker from the agency to help students resolve their conflicts. They help craft the solution themselves and so they’re invested in making it work.

When I was at Forest Heights 12 years ago, I met a troubled, short-tempered young woman who was suspended twice in one year for fighting and harassing other students.

But she was transformed by an innovative co-op program that brought her together with disabled students at the school. With incredible gentleness, she played with them, helped them to eat and wiped their faces afterwards.

“You’re so happy when you’re with these kids,” she said. “I can’t get mad.”

A combination of resources and goodwill from the school helped her. It could help others, too.