1. 11/20/2016 SPOTLIGHT! | Smith-Barbieri
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SPOTLIGHT!
Grant aims to change the way schools discipline
kids
Smith-Barbieri Progressive Fund funded project!
By Sherry Jones
The Spokane School District has a discipline problem—but it’s the opposite of what people might think.
Although school disciplinary rates in Spokane are more than twice the average for Washington—8.4 percent of
the district’s students were suspended or expelled last year as opposed to an average of 3.3 percent statewide
—increasingly, child-advocacy groups and parents are saying the discipline itself is part of the problem.
“Suspensions and expulsions don’t work,” says Nikki Lockwood, parent of an autistic child and a member of
the Every Student Counts Alliance, a consortium of parents, educators, and advocacy groups re-thinking the
way Spokane schools deal with student misbehaviors.
Working with the Spokane School District since the start of the year, the alliance has pushed reforms of ages-
old policies and practices that send problem students home— or, in some cases, into the criminal justice
system.
“What we’re doing right now isn’t working,” Vanessa Hernandez of the ACLU of Washington says. “Our goal
should be to keep kids in school and prepare them for success.”
Schools, after all, are in the business of education, not criminal justice. But when students disrupt class—a
misdemeanor under state law, Hernandez says—teachers’ first inclination can be to remove the problem, which
means sending the child to the principal’s office. Too many times down the hall can result in a students’
suspension.
One suspension, more often than not, leads to another, she says.
“Students who are suspended are more than two times as likely to get suspended again. Taking them out of
school isn’t teaching them a lesson.”
Breaking the cycle
These efforts have just gotten a boost from the Smith-Barbieri Progressive Fund’s recent $25,000 award to the
ACLU for its Youth Policy Project, which coordinates the Every Student Counts Alliance.
The award dovetails nicely with the fund’s focus on alleviating poverty in Spokane, Fund administrator Sharon
Smith says.
“We’ve become increasingly aware of how for a growing number of students — particularly the most
disenfranchised – the path to incarceration begins in school. Our eyes were really opened, though, when we
learned how great the issue is in Spokane, with more than double the suspensions and expulsions than
anywhere else in the state in 2015,” she says.
“The Fund’s primary mission is eradicating systemic injustices that lead to poverty and incarceration, and
there’s no better place to start than with our children.”
In Spokane as elsewhere in the U.S., students of color, those with disabilities, and those deemed at-risk—most
often from low-income households—suffer the most from punitive practices at school.
Studies indicate that, in Spokane, black students are twice as likely to be disciplined and those with disabilities
get suspended or expelled three times as often. In other words, they’re being singled out.
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Virla Spencer didn’t need a study to tell her that. A black mother of seven children, she has fought what she
says are unfair disciplinary measures against four of them.
Most recently, she says, her 15-year-old son was handcuffed and nearly charged with criminal trespassing while
waiting outside a middle school for his sister to get out of school—while, according to a video, his white
schoolmates standing in the same area were neither detained nor told to leave, she says.
The wrong lessons
“We trust as parents that when we send our kids to these institutions that they’re actually going to learn,”
Spencer says. “But there’s been more damage than good. Now what is my son going to think of law
enforcement? He felt like an animal. He felt nasty.”
And events and incidents affect a teen differently than they would an adult, she points out. “They define who
you are.”
Adolescent brains do change at an astonishing rate, Hernandez agrees. Between ages 10 and 25, the human
brain develops as much as during the first three years of life— making the school years a make-or-break time
for future success, she says.
“There’s a tremendous capacity for change and growth, and we should be working to harness that instead of
‘throw the bad kids out.’ We know what that does: dropping out, failing grades, youth and adult criminal justice
involvement. It’s not accomplishing what we want, and we can do better.”
Instead of the punitive approach to discipline, the Every Student Counts Alliance supports:
Behavioral supports and intervention, teaching students how they are expected to behave, rewarding students
when they achieve those goals, and providing more targeted support for students who need help;
Restorative practices, focusing not on punishment but on what has happened, its effects on the school or
community, the needs and responsibilities of all involved, and how to make amends and repair harm; and,
A trauma-informed approach, understanding that children suffering trauma at home or in other areas of life may
react and respond differently than adults might expect and adapting expectations or behaviors to avoid
triggering them—while also teaching the student better ways to deal with their “triggers.”
“Instead of pushing them away,” Hernandez says, “we’re pulling them in.”
It takes a community
Although such sweeping changes will likely take years to fully take effect, the alliance is already making a
difference. Spokane Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Shelley Redinger has signed a resolution recognizing
the negative effects of the district’s existing policies, and convened a working group of school administrators,
community members, teachers, and parents to oversee a two-year reform initiative.
Staff training in Positive Behavioral Intervention Support (PBIS) also has begun, with 80 percent of the district’s
schools implementing the program and the remainder set to do so this year, says Adam Swinyard, Secondary
Schools Director for the Spokane School District.
Also, the Spokane School Board recently approved a new discipline policy that emphasizes restorative
practices.
Hand-in-hand with these approaches is a commitment to funding a “cultural inventory,” Redinger says, aimed at
helping teachers and staff identify their cultural biases.
“As our schools have become more diverse, we can’t reach students we’re not relating to,” she says.
That includes autistic children, whose numbers continue to grow, says Dawn Sidell, founder and executive
director of the Northwest Autism Center, an alliance member. For dealing with these students as well as those
with other disabilities, staff and teacher training is key to success, she says.
“As you see the population of students with special needs increase—and, in particular, students with ASD—you
see how stretched districts become, and how unprepared many of the staff are for taking in these students,”
Sidell says.
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Wendy Bromley, assistant principal at North Central High
School in Spokane, and Maryo Gustafson, dean of students
The solutions promoted by the Every Student Counts Alliance and the ACLU have been shown to work: in
Denver, instituting restorative practices reduced school discipline by 46 percent, says Rosey Thurman of Team
Child, a youth legal-advocacy program and alliance member.
“We’re getting such great community involvement that wasn’t there before,” Thurman says. “And we’re all
thrilled by the Smith-Barbieri Progressive Fund’s role.” The grant will be crucial for increasing parent training
and involvement as well as youth involvement, she says.
“We’re grateful the school district and a terrific local coalition are working together to create and implement a
better model of education equity,” the Fund’s Sharon Smith says, “so all students stay in school and get the
education they deserve.”
North Central High School leads the way, with results
A teen walks up to the North Central High School dean of students, Mary
O. Gustafson, during lunchtime.
“I don’t need anger management any more,” he says.
“Why?” Gustafson says.
“My anger is way down.”
Standing nearby, assistant principal Wendy Bromley grins.
“This is the kind of conversations we have.”
Formerly special education teachers, Bromley and
Gustafson two years ago spearheaded the use of Positive
Behavioral Intervention Support (PBIS) at the school,
making NC the first in the Spokane School District to shift
its disciplinary focus away from punitive suspensions,
expulsions, and arrests to, instead, teaching valuable life skills such as anger management and conflict
resolution and requiring students to atone for harm they have caused.
“We’re looking at how to improve not just discipline, but behavior,” says principal Steve Fisk, who credits the
women with crafting the school’s two-year-old PRIDE model, an adaptation of PBIS.
Described in posters throughout the school and explained to pupils in the classroom, PRIDE—Perseverance,
Respect, Integrity, Dependability, and Excellence—sums up the school’s expectations, backed by a
commitment to help students meet these goals.
“We’re all here for every kid who walks through our doors,” Gustafson says.
To illustrate how the new approach works, Bromley offers an anecdote: a P.E. teacher reminded a student of
school rules, and the student cursed at her. Speaking privately after class, the teacher told the girl that she
didn’t like being spoken to that way and explaining the rule the girl had broken. The student apologized, and left
the office on good terms. Chances are, Bromley said, the teacher won’t have trouble with that student again.
Or there was the time Bromley became incensed by a student’s fabrication. She accused the girl several times,
wanting to hear her admit that she’d lied. At home that night, she realized that she’d been out of line.
The next day, she approached the student and apologized. “She was dumbfounded,” Bromley says. “No adult
had ever apologized to her.”
The key, Fisk says, lies in understanding that conflicts and student misbehaviors are so often about
relationships. Students lash out at teachers; they fight with their friends; they come to school upset by trauma
at home, and take it out on those around them.
“This should be a place where we teach them,” Fisk says. “Because when they leave here, all bets are off.”
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The Mobile Market in THEZONE
will be modeled after a
successful Mobile Market out of
Not all conflicts are easily resolved; nor are all infractions minor. When students today need a “time out,”
though, the school only rarely sends them home. Instead, they’ll study and reflect in the Intervention Room,
whose teacher also serves as counselor. And once a week, the teachers, staff, and administrators meet as a
large group to discuss “kids of concern” and develop individualized “service plans” for them.
“It’s a whole-child approach,” Bromley says.
And, so far, it’s working. Since the school implemented PBIS:
Short-term suspensions dropped from 140 during the 2014-2015 school year to 40 last year.
Attendance has risen 2.5 percent—an increase Fisk called “significant.”
Graduation rates have risen 3.5 percent, to 89.5 percent last year. Fisk expects
that figure to reach 92 percent in 2017.
Test scores have risen by 14 percent.
These results are important not just for the students who’ve improved but also for the program’s continued
existence. PBIS doesn’t come cheaply, not at first: teachers and staff must be trained, more counselors hired,
and more time spent with every struggling student: “We go a bit slower for quality work, so every kid feels they
have a place here,” Fisk says.
Over time, Bromley says, the costs will recoup themselves as teachers and staff work to resolve problems so
they don’t recur.
“When you repair those relationships up front, you save money on the back end,” she says.
Sherry Jones is a freelance writer and author living in Spokane. Contact her at jewelofmedina@gmail.com.
Tackling food insecurity
Smith-Barbieri Progressive Fund funded project!
August 29, 2016
Grant aims to tackle food insecurity in THEZONE
An $85,000 grant from the Smith-Barbieri Progressive Fund will help two new projects in THEZONE get started
this spring.
Both projects, THEZONE Mobile Market and Green Schoolyards, focus on
providing access to healthy and affordable food, as well as the knowledge of how
to grow and prep these foods. This kind of access is often a challenge in areas of
high poverty. The average poverty level in THEZONE is 32 percent, with some
census tracts tipping 50 percent.
In addition, much of THEZONE is considered a food desert due to a lack of grocery
stores, farmers’ markets, and healthy food providers.
THEZONE Mobile Market will coordinate with local grocers, farmers and 2nd
Harvest to obtain foods that will be sold at or below market prices. A retro-fitted
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