10/10/03

Dear Mr. Price,

We appreciate your plans to have an open forum with concerned Aycock parents.  We hope you will confirm the meeting date and time immediately.  In anticipation of this meeting with you and because the academic year is already 25% complete, we have outlined our concerns and ideas below so that solutions can be implemented without further delay.

We are a group of concerned parents, mostly of students in the Spanish Immersion program.  We consider the discipline situation at Aycock to be at a crisis level.  The disruptions, due to poor behavior, prevent all the children at Aycock from learning.  The environment is not positive for anyone involved.  Drastic action is needed.

Disruptive behavior comes in all forms in the class.  The youth are being extremely disrespectful to teachers by talking back to them and acting sassy.  Some are perpetually late to class, interrupting class to enter.  Some shout across the classroom.  Some are constantly out of their seats.  Some simply do not know how to be quiet. Some refuse to follow instructions and have their own agendas.  Some exhibit explosive behavior, such as throwing books at walls.  With all of these happening, teachers are often unable to get a complete thought across before having to call down students.

The constant disruption prevents material from being introduced and leads to non-problem students “vacating.”   Teachers refrain from making subjects, like science, exciting with hands-on experiments, etc., because they cannot trust the problem students to behave appropriately.  It is difficult for dedicated students to remain interested in the shreds of subject matter that can be taught if it is persistently littered with this type of behavior.  This only describes the classroom-learning environment.  As you are well aware, shoving in the hallways and intimidation in the bathroom also exists.

We consider drastic, immediate action a necessity.  While long-term plans need to be, and some are being, implemented, we require a short-term, zero-tolerance, emergency plan to get the current situation under control:

1)      Get Support.  Parents are willing.  Parents are willing to patrol halls and help monitor classes.  While many of us work during school hours and the scheduling of these activities is difficult, we are willing to try and help.  Organize us. 

2)      Another approach is to have all adults in the building, from administrators to school counselors to custodial staff, be empowered to act and be on ‘high alert’ for the next couple of weeks, with scheduled assigned areas to patrol and supervise.  Workshops and in-service and out-of-building meetings would be minimized or cancelled in order to direct full attention to getting the discipline problems throughout the school (and outside, around the buildings) under control.  In addition, the school might call on substitutes to come in and help with discipline. 

a)      Subs can help with discipline.  They can help with ISS, with escorting kids to ISS.  They can help monitor halls and bathrooms at class changes.  They can be there when a teacher calls for assistance. 

b)     We recommend a “martial law” situation that might exist for a few weeks, so that a thorough response would be possible.

3)      Streamline referrals.  Teachers need to be able to refer to ISS immediately.  In order to implement a zero-tolerance environment, a teacher needs to be able to remove an unruly student immediately.

a)      Write-ups should be checklists.  The details can come later and are not at the price of valuable class time.

b)     Immediate escorts.  More personnel are needed to offer assistance to teachers.  If an escort is needed to remove a student, it should be done quickly.  Every moment between a request for an escort and the arrival of an escort is wasted learning time because the disruption usually continues or even escalates.

c)      Zero-tolerance no matter how full ISS gets.

d)     Keep disruptive students assigned to ISS until their behavior change can be documented.  If disruptive behavior must be documented before a student can be removed from a classroom, set up a documented system for them to earn their return to the regular classroom.

4)      If there are five steps to be followed with a child who is causing a problem, let it not be that he/she starts over with step 1 each time a behavioral offense occurs.

Kids ejected from the class because of disruption, hostile or not, need to be re-educated about how to act in class.  We recognize that many of the students causing problems are in drastic need of help from many different areas.  They should receive the help they need to allow them to learn and be successful in the classroom.  However, these issues cannot possibly be addressed in the middle school classroom especially at the expense of students who are trying to learn.  Our teachers are here to teach. Period.  Those preventing teaching and learning from taking place need to be dealt with in a different place, with different professionals who can address their needs.

Respectfully yours,

Aycock Middle School Parent(s)