When Did Common Sense End in School Discipline and Safety?
Training students not to open exterior school doors to let someone inside is a best practice. Suspending a student who violated the rule to help a woman with her hands full is not a best practice. A Southampton County, Virginia, middle school student was suspended from school after opening a door for a woman with […]
Fear mongering article? America’s real school-safety problem
Good theory, perhaps, but clueless in understanding School Resource Officers (SROs), school security, and so-called “zero tolerance.” This is my take on America’s real school-safety problem, an article posted Sunday on salon.com. The article is mostly a Q&A with Aaron Kupchick, author of “Homeroom Security: School Discipline in an Age of Fear.” He spent two years researching “zero […]
Tying Educators’ Hands In School Safety Efforts
Chuck Hibbert is a national school safety consultant (including for my company) and 21-year-veteran school district administrator over school security and school police services for a 15,000 student district in Indiana. Chuck takes issue with ““Taking Safety Too Far: The Ill-Defined Role Police Play in Schools,” February 24th commentary article in Education Week by authors and civil rights advocates Johanna Wald […]
Bullying: Parent or School Responsibility?
Who is ultimately responsible for school bullying – parents, schools, the victims? CNN’s Rick Sanchez and I had a lengthy on-air discussion yesterday afternoon on bullying, the roles of teachers and parents, who is responsible when a bullied teen commits suicide, and what parents can do to support their children who may be bullied or […]
School Anti-Bullying Laws Are The Wrong Approach
School anti-bullying laws ‘sound good and feel good, but they provide little-to-no new resources to educators. High-profile bullying incidents, including a number resulting in victim suicides, have fueled calls for more state and federal anti-bullying laws. The latest school bullying case in Massachusetts resulted in the death of 15-year-old Phoebe Prince and criminal charges against nine teens. […]
Anti-School Police Commentary Paints False School Safety Picture
In ““Taking Safety Too Far: The Ill-Defined Role Police Play in Schools,” a February 24th commentary article in Education Week, authors and civil rights advocates Johanna Wald and Lisa Thurau presented what I believe to be a very skewed misrepresentation of school resource officers (SROs), school police, and administrators. I responded with a letter to the editor […]