East county schools top suspensions list

Principals experimenting with positive support, alternative methods of discipline in effort to reduce numbers

Or rewards for good behavior, as in the case of a new program at Col. E. Brooke Lee Middle School in Silver Spring. The school had 27.1 suspensions per 100 students during 2005-2006 school year, the highest number in the county according to figures compiled by the Maryland State Department of Education. Principal Mary Beth Waits, in an e-mail, attributed 20 percent of the school’s overall number of suspensions to two incidents that took place off school grounds involving Lee students.

This year, in an attempt to keep suspensions down, Lee instituted Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports, a national program that rewards positive behaviors rather than punishes negative ones. The school has focused on respect and responsibility to self, others and the environment all year, with students who demonstrate the traits receiving play money to buy food and goods at a school store, Waits said in an interview.

The program has led to fewer referrals and suspensions this year, Waits said, while challenging teachers’ and administrators’ approaches to discipline.

‘‘It’s so much easier to say, ‘Don’t do ‘X’ than, ‘We want you to do ‘Y,’” she said.

Rolling Terrace Elementary School in Takoma Park has started a similar program this year called Tiger Traits. Each month, students are rewarded for demonstrating a certain highlighted trait from a code of conduct, Principal Jennifer Ostrowski said in an e-mail.

Occasionally, instead of suspension, students at John F. Kennedy High School in Silver Spring perform community service work, cleaning up the school’s exterior or doing work inside the building, Principal Thomas Anderson said. Some parents prefer a working punishment to suspension because students miss less class time and a suspension does not appear on a permanent record.

‘‘Suspension alone is not meaningful,” he said. ‘‘We want to make it meaningful.”

The state’s data was based on information compiled from schools and school systems. Schools not included in the report did not have any suspensions during the school year, and one east county school, Roscoe R. Nix Elementary School in Silver Spring, only opened this school year.

The state’s report did not list the number of students suspended, only the number of suspensions. It did, however, break down suspensions by race and gender, which indicated blacks and Hispanics were more likely to be suspended than students of any other race at all levels of schooling. At the high school level countywide, for example, three-fourths of all suspended students in 2005-2006 were either black or Hispanic, though only 40 percent of all high school students were either black or Hispanic that year.

The data also showed higher total suspensions and suspensions per 100 students in eastern Montgomery County than anywhere else in the county. The principals interviewed were unsure as to the exact reason why but pointed to the area’s socioeconomic makeup, unlike anywhere else in the county, posing unique challenges for schools.

‘‘I suspect that the greater diversity in terms of race, ethnicity and social class in eastern Montgomery County schools also bring a greater challenge in terms of creating a shared culture and value system with regard to school rules and behavior,” Waits said in an e-mail.

Principals have the final say on whether a student is suspended and base the decision on information and recommendations from other administrators and staff. It is a responsibility they do not take lightly.

‘‘Any suspension is too many,” Ostrowski said in an e-mail, echoing her colleagues sentiments. ‘‘I would much rather work proactively with the student, the student’s parents [and] teachers ... to assist the child in making better decisions.”

Ultimately, however, a principal must weigh the effect of removing a student from school against what effect the student staying in school will have on the rest of the student body.

Some offenses typically garner a suspension without much discussion. At Kennedy, for example, a student involved in a fight is immediately suspended for 10 days, Anderson said, but that number can be reduced once administrators gather all of the facts surrounding the fight.

But for offenses where there is room for interpretation of rules, such as using foul language, disrupting a class or disobeying and disrespecting staff, a punishment’s severity is a principal’s decision. Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring had both the largest enrollment and number of incidences of suspension in 2005-2006, according to the state report. But Principal Phillip Gainous said the number of suspensions does not reflect the number of students at the school but rather his own expectations for student behavior.

‘‘I defend and support students to the end,” Gainous said. ‘‘But when they are disrespectful or disobey adults, I don’t tolerate that.”

Minus took a similar, hard-line approach at Key Middle School. The school had 208 suspensions during the 2005-2006 school year, the largest number for a middle school in Montgomery County. ‘‘There were clear messages we needed to send to kids about how to behave,” he said.

All of the principals interviewed said repeat offenders receive a majority of all suspensions. For the first eight months of the current school year, for example, Blair has had 332 incidences of suspension involving 97 students, Gainous said.

Still, parents and students pay attention to suspension data, particularly in areas such as the Downcounty and Northeast consortia, where students have a choice in enrollment.

‘‘Suspension data is something people will look at in evaluating schools,” said Phillip Kaufman, area vice president for the Northeast Consortium with the Montgomery County Council of Parent Teacher Association. ‘‘People want to see similar incidences treated equally across schools.”

Gainous has noticed a fundamental change in the nature of suspensions at all schools since he became a principal more than 30 years ago. Back then, administrators would try to get a student to admit he or she did something wrong; now, he said, students take responsibility for their actions but often do not see them as inappropriate.

‘‘Part of our teaching is to help them understand certain behaviors are not acceptable in school,” Gainous said.

Anderson agreed. ‘‘We have to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” he said. A student suspended from Kennedy may not agree with the punishment but will always be explained the process behind the ruling, he said.

Ultimately, Minus and other principals said a suspension always serves an immediate purpose but is ineffective overall if the lesson learned does not extend outside of the classroom.

‘‘If there is no expectation of a behavior change at home, it is unlikely there will be a behavior change at school,” he said.