Jose de Wit
SUN Staff Writer
Nearly one out of every three Española Valley High School students was suspended at least once last school year, an analysis of disciplinary records shows.
Out of 746 students enrolled last year, 233 — or close to a third — were punished with out-of-school suspensions at least once last school year, according to discipline logs.
Included in that third is the otherwise model student sent home for half a day and the habitual truant who is a regular in drug court. It includes one student suspended 45 days for bringing to school drugs and two knives, the 40 or more students suspended three days or more for fighting and the 60 or so students sent home for a day for anything from text messaging to leaving class without permission.
For nearly every kind of infraction, administrators doled out the same punishment in most cases: suspension. As the severity of the infraction varied, the punishment changed only in length, ranging from half a day to 45.
Administrators said they have to discipline unruly students somehow, and suspensions are pretty much the only option they have.
“That’s pretty much all I got,” Principal Bruce Hopmeier said.
Science teacher Damon McGinn said the best way to deal with disciplinary issues is in the classroom, by laying down clear rules and expectations and developing rapport with students. McGinn said that with effective classroom management, he has been able to avoid referring any of his students for disciplinary action for at least a year.
McGinn also said suspensions could cause some students to fall behind in class. For that reason, McGinn tries to keep his students even out of in-school suspension.
At the high school, students are assigned to in-school suspension mostly when they are late to class, Hopmeier said. Late students are usually sent to in-school suspension only for the class period they are late for, so they don’t disrupt the class by arriving late.
“When they’re late to my class, I just try to pull them out (of in-school suspension),” McGinn said, pointing out that it is even more disruptive for the student to make up missed classwork the next day. “I’d rather have them late but here, than to not have them here at all.”
Math teacher Brian Every pointed out suspensions are necessary in some cases.
“If a student is being disruptive in my class, I want him out,” Every said.
Out of a total 602 disciplinary incidents recorded at the high school last school year, only a quarter of were resolved without a suspension. Some students received a warning. About 20 resulted in a conference with the student or his or her parents, or a phone call home. A handful — fewer than 10 — were referred to in-school suspension.
But in most cases — 75 percent of them — a visit to the principal’s office resulted in a day or more out of school.
Data provided by the high school shows that major disciplinary incidents — which include drugs, weapons and fighting — increased last school year to 118 incidents, up from 84 incidents the previous two school year.
Younger students accounted for the vast majority of disciplinary incidents last school year. A total of 288 high school students were recorded on discipline logs last school year. Roughly 100 were 10th graders, and 117 were ninth graders.
Some of those were older students who were reclassified as ninth-graders due to a two-year-old high school policy that assigns students to grade levels according to credits earned instead of age. Others attended the high school’s alternative school, which last school year brought some of Española middle school’s lowest-performing students and isolated them in portable buildings at the high school.
“Those were the students who had already been through the ninth grade at least once and were still not ready to move on to the 10th grade,” said Assistant Principal Dolores Guzman, who oversaw the alternative school last year. “From the beginning, we tried to set clear boundaries, structure, expectations. But there was some serious behavioral stuff going on, a lot of them refusing to follow rules.”
A total of 66 students attended the alternative school last year, though not all at the same time, according to figures provided by Guzman. All but 18 of those students were referred for some kind of disciplinary action at least once, according to disciplinary records.
The idea behind the alternative school was to focus on getting the group of students to be successful — that is, to pass the basic classes they had failed at least once or twice before, Guzman said. Three teachers tried to help the group of students catch up with their peers, partly through remedial math and reading computer courses. Though housed on the high school campus, the alternative school was almost completely closed off from the rest of the school, Guzman said. An attempt to let them eat lunch with the rest of the school failed because students would return late or not at all. Its students could not participate in clubs or sports — and they were not eligible for in-school suspension.
Thumbing through a thick stack of discipline reports, Guzman tried to count how many incidents had been handled without suspending the student.
“We have some parent conferences, here’s an intervention with a counselor,” Guzman said. “But yes, basically, a lot of suspensions.”
The trouble is, the disciplinary data suggests much of the time, suspensions are not effective in deterring students from acting out. In almost half the recorded cases, one suspension did not prevent a student from acting out again: 107 students who received a suspension went on to get another before the end of the school year, and 57 were suspended three or more times.
One student received 10 suspensions last school year, which translated to 43 days of missed class. The student’s infractions included fighting, smoking marijuana and calling a teacher “a f…g idiot.” But many of that student’s infractions were for the same issue: smoking or possessing cigarettes.
Another student was suspended five times, for a total of 17 days, for the exact same infraction each time: fighting.
Students themselves also doubt the effectiveness of suspensions. Junior Jacob Garcia said he has never been suspended, though he admitted he was “written up” once for talking back to a teacher. But Garcia said he has seen friends and classmates get suspensions, and their reaction is usually indifferent.
“It really doesn’t help a lot,” Garcia said. “They don’t care. They come back the next day and they’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, I got suspended. Whatever.’”
Garcia suggested that to be effective, punishments should be unpleasant.
“It should be something not fun,” Garcia said. “Like helping janitors, or helping serve in the cafeteria. Not just a day off from school.”
Hopmeier agreed suspensions are not always the most effective way to deal with misbehavior, but said he does not have the resources to try out other ideas.
At other schools where Hopmeier has worked, in Arizona and Colorado, administrators regularly checked up on students who showed certain warning signs: failing classes, not participating in sports or activities, constant absences or tardiness, Hopmeier said, and the strategy often worked.
“We’d meet with them from time to time, find out if there’s something going on with their lives, if there’s anything we could do to help them,” Hopmeier said. “Kids are pretty honest. They’ll tell you what’s going on.”
To do that, though, Hopmeier said he would need the help of another assistant principal, maybe two. The high school currently has one principal, Hopmeier, and two assistant principals, Guzman and DeVanna Ortega.
“It takes manpower, and we don’t have it,” Hopmeier said.