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Henninger High School hall monitor Shirley Doesey keeps an eye out during a change of classes.

(Dennis Nett | dnett@syracuse.com)

Syracuse teachers say the level of disruption in their schools has ratcheted up this year and the district has not acted forcefully enough to bring order to their hallways and classrooms.

“I’ve seen it really trend up this year, and all my members say the same thing when I talk to them,” said Kevin Ahern, president of the Syracuse Teachers Association. “And I’ve heard it at elementary schools more than I’ve ever heard it.”

Ahern said schools aren’t “the Wild West,” and most children are well-behaved. But teachers say students who do cause disruptions are often disciplined only lightly, if at all, and are quickly back in their classrooms.

Henninger High School sentry Michael S. Walker checks the hallways as classes change.

But even as some teachers are calling for a more aggressive approach to discipline, a local civil rights group will meet Saturday over concerns that schools punish students too harshly. Those concerns echo a recently released national study that highlights Syracuse's relatively high – and racially skewed – suspension rates.

And Syracuse Superintendent Sharon Contreras points to suspension numbers that actually increased slightly in the fall of this year as compared to the previous two years. She thinks the district suspends too many students.

Teachers say none of that seems to change what they see every day in their schools. In a year of increased stress in schools across the state because of budget cuts, new teacher evaluations and tougher academic standards, teachers at several city schools told The Post-Standard their greatest stress comes from worsening student behavior.

They say children at all levels are more apt to fight, talk back to teachers and be generally disrespectful, and that makes it more difficult for others to learn.

The teachers are not all calling for more suspensions, but they are seeking calmer classrooms. The teachers spoke on the condition that their names not be used, saying they feared that either they or their building administrators could face repercussions from the district if they spoke out.

Six of the teachers came together to the paper and spoke in a group. Others responded individually when they heard the paper was doing a story about school discipline.

They described schools where students roam the halls when they should be in class, talk back to teachers and get into fights that can endanger other children.

Unruly students may be removed from the classroom for a few days, but they soon return and cause further disruption, a teacher at a K-8 school said.

“They either come back to the building or they get moved to another building with no consequence,” she said.

Parents also are concerned. Mary Handley, treasurer of the PTO at H.W. Smith K-8 School, said she worries about the safety of her second-grade daughter at the school, which is in the former Levy school building this year because of renovations.

“There have been incidents in the hallway that compromise the safety of all the kids, but particularly the smaller kids,” she said, adding, “A 16-year-old eighth-grader is a big kid.”

Handley, along with all of the teachers who spoke to The Post-Standard, said there is a pervasive feeling that district leaders want to keep discipline numbers down and that referring students for disciplinary hearings is discouraged.

Contreras and her top administrators say that is simply not true. Brian Nolan, director of high schools and career education, said he is aware that such a perception is out there, but he doesn’t know where it came from.

“It didn’t come from me; it didn’t come from Sharon,” he said. “That’s a million-dollar question, where that came from.”

In fact, Contreras said, the district’s discipline data suggest that the administration is acting aggressively on behavior problems.

“I’m looking at the data and I see the number of in-school suspensions and out-of-school suspensions, so I know that the principals are acting,” she said.

Three years of data provided by the district -- covering two years of Contreras’ tenure and one year under former Superintendent Dan Lowengard – show suspension numbers rising slightly this fall. The district provided numbers for September through December, so that the completed fall numbers for this school year could be compared to the same period in the previous two years.

The numbers show that 11 percent of all the district’s children were suspended out of school at least once in the fall of 2012, compared to 10 percent in each of the previous two falls. The maximum length of a suspension is five days, but students can be suspended more than once. In the most egregious cases, students can be “permanently suspended,” or expelled.

The highest out-of-school suspension rates in fall 2012 were in ninth grade, with 24 percent of students being suspended at least once. But some schools had much higher rates than others. At Danforth Middle School, 37 percent of students were suspended at least once.

Full-year numbers for 2011-12 year are even more eye-opening. Danforth suspended more than half its students – 50.4 percent – that year. Districtwide, seventh-graders were the most suspended, with nearly 46 percent being suspended that year, according to the district numbers.

Overall, 4,210 students were suspended in 2011-12. Many were suspended more than once, for a total of 9,998 suspensions that year. Both numbers were higher than the equivalent numbers for the year before.

The numbers show that black and Latino students get suspended at much higher rates than white and Asian students. Those numbers jibe with a report released last month by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. It showed that Syracuse – along with many other districts across the country – suspends black and Latino students disproportionately to whites and Asians.

Suspension under fire

The number of suspensions in the district has raised the concern of Walt Dixie, leader of the National Action Network of Syracuse, a local civil rights group.

“Suspension is the norm of today,” Dixie said. “There’s got to be a better way to resolve these issues.”

Dixie’s group has invited Contreras and the school board to a meeting at 10 a.m. Saturday at Fountain of Life Church, 700 South Ave., to discuss the issue. Dixie said he was struck recently when he found out about a first-grader he said had been given two five-day suspensions this year.

“This kid shouldn’t be suspended,” he said. “He needs real intervention.”

Dixie’s concerns are echoed in the UCLA report. The report broke down data from 26,000 middle and high schools across the country and found that one out of nine students were suspended at least once in the 2009-10 school year, mostly for disrupting class and other non-violent infractions.

It highlighted 20 school districts in different parts of the country, one of which was Syracuse. It reported that in the 2009-10 school year, the district suspended 20.5 percent of its children. Among African-American boys in middle and high schools, the rate was 38 percent.

Overall, 35 percent of black students without disabilities were suspended at least once, compared to 28 percent of Latinos and 16 percent of whites, the report said. In each group, students with disabilities were suspended even more frequently.

The report cited previous research that showed that students who are suspended in ninth grade are twice as likely to drop out of high school as those who aren’t.

Why the disruptions?

Although Contreras said she has no data to conclude that discipline problems have increased to the extent teachers say, she acknowledges that there have been problems this year.

She said she has been hearing about slow responses by building administrators to discipline referrals, and she attributes that to the sharply increased responsibilities of the administrators. Chief among them are time-consuming new teacher evaluations. The state requires administrators to observe and evaluate every teacher every year.

She also said principals have told her that there are more disruptions in math classes this year, where already struggling students are becoming frustrated at the tougher work required under the new Common Core standards.

Ahern, of the STA, listed some reasons of his own. Budget cuts and shifts over the past few years have left far fewer teaching assistants in the buildings to help control classrooms. Class sizes are larger. And, like Contreras, he pointed to the demands of the teacher evaluations, which keep administrators from focusing on discipline.

Teachers offer another explanation: Students are seeing that there are few consequences to their disrespectful behavior, so they feel free to continue it.

Some teachers say they have become so frustrated by the lack of effective support from the administration that they rarely refer children to the office anymore.

“I think our teachers have been feeling more and more that the responsibility of discipline has been moved to them, to the point that it’s almost solely on them,” Ahern said.

The district said its only measure of student behavior trends is the number of suspensions. It does not collect statistics on the number of times teachers refer students to the principal’s office.

Alternatives needed

Contreras says it is clear to her that the district is suspending too many students.

“I believe that graduation rates will never improve if students are not in school, that students must be in school to learn, and that suspensions should be utilized for the most egregious cases,” she said. “Sending students home … is not going to help us reach our goals.”

The Buffalo school board voted unanimously last month to reduce suspensions. The board barred suspensions for disciplinary problems like truancy, cutting class and running in the halls. Instead, the district will gear up peer counseling and conflict resolution programs.

The changes stemmed from an incident three years ago when a student serving a suspension was shot and killed. He had been suspended for wandering the halls of his high school.

Contreras said she convened her own committee of staff members and parents to look into the district’s code of conduct and its discipline numbers. The existing code says students may be suspended for a wide variety of infractions, from cutting class or refusing to stay for detention to fighting, arson or possession of a weapon.

Contreras said her committee recommended seeking an external evaluation of the district’s discipline procedures, a request she said she will bring to the school board within a few months.

Ahern, of the STA, agrees that suspension is not the best solution. But neither, he says, is allowing chronically disruptive students to stay in classrooms where other children are trying to learn.

“We’ve got to have alternative programs for the kids,” he said.

The district no longer runs the Beard Alternative School or the VINTA program – for Violence Is Not the Answer. It now runs a small alternative program for high school students at the Johnson Center, and each middle school can place a limited number of disruptive students in a BEST classroom in their building. BEST stands for Better Expectations Start Today.

Last year, BEST classrooms had two teachers for about 15 students. This year, because of budget cuts, the classes have just a teacher and a teaching assistant, but the district says the classes will be back to full staffing next year.

The district’s K-8 schools chose not to have BEST classrooms in their buildings, Nolan said.

Contreras said she agrees the district needs more alternative programs. That’s true even at the elementary level, where she said there is “increasingly violent and disruptive” behavior. But funding for such programs is hard to come by, she said. She added that some children need mental health services, which have recently been cut back by the state.

Nolan said that although there are fewer teaching assistants in the schools, there are more resources from Say Yes to Education, including counselors and mental health specialists. But he said many teachers do not know those resources are available.

He said the district has to start being more proactive about student behavior rather than simply reacting when kids act out.

“We shouldn’t have 38 percent of our African-American boys in high school being suspended,” he said. “It’s not the fault of the kid. It’s the system that has to figure out how to adjust to the needs of the kid in a proper way.”

Handley, the H.W. Smith parent, agrees – to a point.

“It is true that suspension doesn’t help, because it’s just sending a kid home for a few days,” she said. “But what it does help is it gives the building at least some relief for a few days to put together a plan of how to deal with this.”

Are you concerned about discipline at your school? Do you have ideas on how best to deal with student misbehavior? If you're a teacher, administrator, student or parent with thoughts on the issue, share them by emailing Paul Riede at priede@syracuse.com, calling him at 470-3260 or commenting below.

