"The Alternate Classroom Model"
- Fred
- a few seconds ago
- 6 min read
My Aunt was a teacher at St. Richard's Catholic School in North Olmsted, Ohio back in the 1980's. Now St. Richard's, the school, is closed, but let me paint a picture of what the first grade classrooms looked like a generation ago.
There were three 1st grade classrooms at St. Richard's:
Classroom A - Run by an old, overweight, and slow, Nun. She ran her classroom with an iron fist. Good kids were afraid of her, bad kids could outrun her. She was out-of-shape and winded when using the ruler. To my knowledge, kids from that classroom were only sent to the principal so they could be reported to their parents.
Classroom B - Run by an old, skinny, but fast, Nun. She ran her classroom with an iron fist.
Good kids were afraid of her, bad kids couldn't outrun her. She was whip-fast with the ruler and order was maintained. I don't think any kids were sent to the principal from Classroom B.
Classroom C - Run by my Aunt, straight out of college. I didn't get to go with either of my parents for Take Your Kid to Work Day, I got to go to St. Richard's and sit in a different type of classroom. Compared to the public school that I went to, my Aunt was a strict disciplinarian, she didn't put up with shit. Compared to the other 2 Nuns, my Aunt was Mary Poppins. She didn't carry a ruler and only used the threat of transferring kids to Classrooms A or B to instill fear in her students. In my mind, up to this day, the way a classroom should be run is the way my Aunt ran it.
I have a lot of respect for my Aunt, but as many of you know Catholic School teachers only made a fraction of what public school teachers made. So after only a few more years at St. Richard's, my Aunt jumped to the public schools....
And that's where our story begins.
My day job, today, is at the local school district in the Transportation Department. Technically, I am one of the managers, I tell the busses where to go, but I'm not really much more than a glorified bus driver. I am rarely in a classroom, my 'expertise' lies in logistics, running the school's transportation program.
But I am vaguely familiar with what currently happens in the classroom. I hear the stories, our bus drivers often have second jobs in the buildings as lunch monitors, recess aides, and/or office assistants.
Last week I was confronted with something that rocked me to my very core.
A bus driver asked me to check a student's IEP, Student X was very confrontational toward the driver and the principal wasn't doing anything about the write-ups from the driver.
That is not unusual. Principals in the district do not want to remove students from the busses because if the students don't go to school, they don't get their hot lunches and they don't get the school experience. The students are then stuck at home in, sometimes, more problematic circumstances.
My supervisor's answer is always the same: Not my problem. But the transportation department management, loaded with glorified bus drivers, doesn't have the power to remove students from busses. They're not "real" administrators.
Let's say a student hits me on a route, I still have to take the student home, then write up the student at the end of the day. I submit the write up to the principal, and then hope that the principal feels it in their heart to remove the student from the bus.
I'm not saying that's the way it should be, I'm saying that's the way it is.
So the driver in question and I reviewed the IEP of Student X to see what kind of recourse we had toward her student and I was stunned to read a 36 page IEP that documented 8 evacuation incidents-
Editor's Note: I was going to take a screen shot of the IEP and post it here, but that would be illegal. Even if it was redacted, I believe that there could be professional repercussions. You are going to have to take my word that the document exists.
Evacuation Incidents? Apparently the kid is so bad in school, that when he has an episode, which is described as an exacerbated tantrum, no one removes the kid from the classroom. The teacher and the rest of the kids pack up their bookbags and everyone exits to an "alternate classroom" to continue the educational day.
Student X basically continues his tantrum until he burns himself out. I was unclear whether it is an administrator or a resource officer that waits for the outburst to end. One episode lasted for over 90 minutes. I re-read the IEP 3 times, I couldn't believe what I was reading. I asked my supervisor to verify what I was reading. She said she never heard of such a thing.
How did the American Classroom shift so dramatically in a generation?
I mean, what are we doing here?
My Aunt retired in her early 60's at the first sniff of Covid. You could tell she was done. She was taught in college that she was in control of her classroom. She was taught specific teaching techniques that had been in use for decades. Over the years, the administrators in the public schools eroded her control of the classroom. If I told her the story above, I'm sure she wouldn't be surprised, classroom discipline had been moving in that direction for years.
Now, again, my Aunt came from the Catholic School background, she wasn't pushing an LGBT Agenda or a Religious Agenda. She wasn't a Nun, she taught the cores of reading, writing, and arithmetic.
But she did believe in consequences. We have a bus driver in our district that's 84 years old and he talks about consequences for bad behavior all the time. Like Moses on the Mount, he preaches lessons learned from when he was a teacher and coach before he retired 20 years ago. He came back to the district a few years back and I hired him. Why did he come back into education at 80? I think he was bored, he enjoys driving teams to their events and watching high school sports. Why did I hire him? He's a good man...and Ohio has a critical bus driver shortage.
As a matter of fact, everyone over 50 in the bus garage talks about consequences. When my Aunt retired, you could tell from her stories that the classroom model had been evolving away from discipline for years.
You argue that a teacher's authority should be eroded? They are indoctrinating our kids? 85% of teachers are burned out and just want to make it through the day. Now every district has that high school art teacher with a rainbow flag in the corner and safe spaces. But most of the TEACHERS got into teaching for the right reasons. Every month or so, the Daily Mail finds some kook teacher pushing an agenda, but there's exceptions to the rule in every profession. I'm sure you remember both the best, and the worst, teacher you ever had.
But many school personnel under 50, especially 30-something year old principals, talk about de-emphasizing consequences. If you write up the same kid too many times you are "targeting." If the minority student has bad behavior, it's often chalked up to "institutional racism." Districts are now terrified of looking racist. Is Student X, in this case, a minority? Yes.
Now my response is always the same. Because I run the routing program, I only see pink, green, and purple push pins, I don't see Black or White. The schools can do whatever they want on the inside, but on a bus, poorly behaved students are a safety issue and need to be removed from the bus.
This might as well be painted on the wall behind my desk because I say it so often:
You can't crash a school.
You can crash a bus.
As administrators continue to push for school rules on the bus, the Alternate Classroom example haunts me in two ways:
The average school bus driver is now 54 years old. As drivers continue to preach consequences, younger administrators are practically daring them to quit. Many of them do. (7,000 less drivers than in 2018).
Students with certain types of IEP's cannot be removed from busses. For example, last year we had a student with Oppositional Defiant Disorder. When we tried to remove the student from the bus for repetitive bad behavior, the principal said we were more than welcome to take the kid off the bus, we just had to come up with a solution for alternate transportation. I don't think she read the memo about the school bus driver shortage.
A generation ago, many substitutes for the teachers were retired teachers. Now retired teachers don't even drive by school buildings. Most subs today are students still working on their degrees. The state of Ohio is so desperate for subs, they don't even have to have a teaching degree.
St. Richard's is closed and the the Catholic Schools that remain have nary a nun between them.
The public schools are at a crossroads. Not because student behavior is out of control, but because schools are having trouble staffing their own departments, from teachers to support staff.
How is it that America doesn't have enough people to run their own schools?
(Hint: Your answer was in this article).