Surrey
Ryan Quinn, principal, Kennebunk Elementary School, Kennebunk, Maine
Alex Spencer, former Manhattan borough principal, Alternative Learning Centers, New York City Public Schools
Vicki Stewart, former director of communications at MSAD 35 in Maine and former principal at Central School
Brie Thomas, school counselor, Central School, South Berwick, Maine
They represent a small fraction of the many educators who have embraced the CPS model and have helped many thousands of vulnerable, at-risk students in the process.
The mission remains the same: understand and help students with concerning behaviors in ways that are nonpunitive, non-adversarial, non-exclusionary, skill building, relationship enhancing, collaborative, proactive, and—most important—helpful. In too many schools, those ingredients are still missing. That's why rates of detention, suspension, and expulsion are still way too high, why schools in nineteen states in the United States still employ corporal punishment, why restraint and seclusion procedures are still employed hundreds of thousands of times in schools every year, and why there are still so many kids who feel disenfranchised, marginalized, disheartened, hopeless, and lost. To bring them back into the fold, we need to find our way to new lenses and new practices. And this needs to be a priority for every school.
The task is not made easier by the fact that classroom teachers have been given the very strong message that their job performance and security are judged by how their students perform on high-stakes tests. Although standards can be a good thing, the obsession with tests hasn't been good for classroom teachers or administrators or parents or students with concerning behaviors, or anyone else. But, as you'll be reading, many schools have accomplished the mission despite all the obstacles.
If you're brand-new to the CPS model, many of your existing beliefs and practices may be called into question by what you read in the ensuing pages. That's OK; our knowledge of kids with concerning behaviors has expanded dramatically over the past forty to fifty years, and it turns out that a lot of what we were thinking about those kids—and doing to them—doesn't square up with what we now know about them. If you're already familiar with the CPS model, this book will take you further.
In an effort to be sensitive to different preferences, the book is written using male, female, and gender-nonspecific pronouns in alternating chapters. I've drawn on a multitude of real kids and educators I've known and worked with in the dialogues in the book, but they are composites; any resemblance to people you may know is purely coincidental (but not necessarily surprising).
I'm looking forward to spending some time with you in the next nine chapters.
Ross Greene
Freeport, Maine
CHAPTER 1 WHO AND WHY
This book is primarily focused on students whose difficulties meeting academic and social expectations at school is communicated through concerning behaviors. The ones who are flying frequently into the assistant principal's office. The ones who are on the receiving end of countless discipline referrals, detentions, suspensions, expulsions, restraints, seclusions, and (yes, in many places, still in the year 2021) paddlings. That these interventions aren't helping is made clear by the fact that they are being applied so frequently to the same students. In almost every school, 70 to 80 percent of discipline referrals are accounted for by the same fifteen to twenty students.
Those are the kids we are losing. We find them in our statistics on dropping out, teenage pregnancy, substance abuse, and incarceration. These are also very expensive kids. Placing a student in a program outside of the mainstream classroom is very costly: more than sixty-five thousand students are placed in alternative education settings every year in the United States, at a cost of an estimated $5 billion. The annual cost of incarcerating kids is even greater. So the stakes are high, both in human and financial terms.
But they're not the only ones we're losing when we don't effectively help these students. Their reasonably well-behaved classmates lose, too. There's lost learning. And there's the stress and anxiety of feeling unsafe in the presence of a peer who can be scary and may seem out of control. And these classmates also have the sense that the adults aren't exactly sure what to do or how to make things better. They may also sense that the ways in which peers with concerning behaviors are being treated are unnecessarily ostracizing and inhumane.
Classroom teachers lose as well (and we lose them, too). Those students—and their parents—are cited as a major contributing factor by many of the high number of teachers who leave the profession within the first four years. And the emphasis on high-stakes testing has caused many classroom teachers to feel like test-prep robots, which, many tell me, has taken a lot of the humanity out of the work. Legislators and school boards often aren't focused on humanity; they're focused on test scores and new initiatives and budgets and reducing referrals into special education.
We lose paraprofessionals and ed-techs as well. These staff members spend a good part of the day with kids with concerning behaviors, but frequently don't even get invited to the meetings in which those kids are being discussed. They are therefore relegated to the “winging-it” approach to intervention, along with the other people in the building—specialists such as the art, music, and physical education teachers—who work with lots of different students but often feel like they know very little about them.
“Sometimes, due to time, specialists (music, art, and so forth) and paraprofessionals can get left out of the conversation in schools. Including them in meetings is so valuable. They have so much insight, and I think we forget about that sometimes because they have such a hard schedule. They have such an important voice because they see everybody in the whole school.”
—NINA, PRINCIPAL
Parents of students with concerning behaviors get lost, too. Those parents know a thing or two about feeling ostracized. They often would welcome the opportunity to collaborate with school staff on making things better, but being blamed for their child's concerning behavior—despite the fact that they have other children in their families who are well behaved—makes them defensive and seldom seen. They want to trust that their child is being well treated at school, but there are many signs to the contrary. Whatever the school is doing isn't working, but the parents feel powerless to do anything about it.
We also risk losing our sense of community as a school when we don't effectively help students with concerning behaviors. Parents of the reasonably well-behaved students—the kids who are showing up ready to learn—may disparage ill-behaved classmates, often demand that those classmates are dealt with harshly and punitively, and may even ostracize the parents of those kids. They understandably want their children to learn and feel safe, but they often lose sight of what is being lost—a child who could be a valued member of the community—when those goals are pursued at the expense of that child.
Administrators, you're in the mix, too. You didn't sign up to be a police officer, but that doesn't mean you don't often feel like one. The classroom teachers who are sending kids to the office expect action and are frequently quite clear about what the action should be: powerful adult-imposed consequences, straight from the school's discipline handbook, that will finally get the message through and ensure that the well-behaved students (and their parents) know that the situation is being taken seriously. The only problem, of course, is that all those consequences aren't working. No one is more acutely aware of that than you. And there are much more effective, compassionate ways to demonstrate that the situation is being taken seriously.
“I remember my first few years as assistant principal before
