Your impact on the outside campus

Hello everyone,

It's one thing to set rules for your class; it's quite another to keep the entire school in mind.

I give for evidence the Garfield mall area during 6th period.

It's a zoo; it's a madhouse; it's a truancy convention. Pick your metaphor. It's a riot of rowdy lodgemen running from room to room in an out of town hotel looking for a party. When it gets chased out of the mall, it moves to the nearby buildings. It loves the 100, 200, and 700 buildings because there are multiple floors and multiple escape routes. On film it would be funny.

In reality it's a problem.

So, what do the individual teachers have to do with it?

The answer is more complex than a quantification. They have nothing, a little, a bit, a lot, and everything to do with it.

Most students in the mall during sixth period are either there working with a teacher (no problem) or are passing through with a legitimate hall pass (small problem). A number of students are ditching PE (not the PE teacher's fault, but a big problem). Some students are out with an excuse but no pass (major problem). Some have been kicked out of class with no referral (major problem). Some are kicked out of class with a referral to the deans--some of those referrals are lost or discarded (huge problem). A small but troublesome group are chronic ditchers who like to stay on campus and cause trouble (potentially very serious problem).

Don't feel smug if you're not at Garfield. I see similar problems at the feeder middle schools, sometimes with worse results.

What can individual teachers do?

First, be careful about your attendance, and always hold students accountable for their attendance in your class. Make sure students enter class only after clearing their absences in the attendance office. (At first, this might send more students into the mall, but because it holds them accountable for truancies, it will eventually help to clear them out.) Give consequences for tardies, but always allow tardy students in. Call the parents of students that are chronically absent; yhey will want to know, and will usually try to help with the problem.

Second, be very careful and stingy with passes. It might be time to review your pass policy and disallow more than you allow. If you saw the sorts of things going on around the bathrooms during 6th period, you might reconsider freely allowing your students to go. Also, many students hang around with someone with a pass to legitimize their truancies. Certainly never give passes except for legitimate emergencies. (A desperate need for chips is not an emergency; bathroom is rarely the emergency that they want it to seem like.)

Third, don't send students out of your class without giving them a destination; ALWAYS FOLLOW UP to make sure they made it to their destination in reasonable time. After class, it's really easy to call the deans' or the counselors' office and see if the student checked in. If not, then give a more severe consequence (a follow up referral, re-stating the first and including the truancy is usually sufficient; the deans follow up well on those things).

Fourth, NEVER NEVER NEVER (to the infinite power) EXCUSE STUDENTS EARLY. If you're on the west side of campus, don't let them fool you into leaving at the clean-up bell.

Finally, if you're out and about during 5th or 6th periods (6th and 7th at Griffith), and you see students who aren't making determined progress toward a fixed goal, challenge them. Ask to see their passes; urge them to go to class; send them to their destinations. (You won't be able to do this to all of them, but you can ask one or two.

Getting that tough kid out of your class may be good for you, but it affects everyone else. Keep that in mind next time you give a pass--especially at the end of the day.

Jeff Combe