How to Walk the Tightrope of Student Discipline Reporting Requirements
A Guide for Savvy School Principals in Arkansas
Arkansas expects administrators of public and charter schools to report lots of data to the Arkansas Department of Education (ADE.) Supposedly, this massive collection of data allows the ADE to hold schools accountable for their performance in terms of academics, safety, discipline, nutritional standards, attendance, etc. Teachers and administrators log onto the Arkansas Public School Computer Network (APSCN) to report their data, while students and parents use APSCN to review it. This system is supposed to be efficient and effective.
However, most administrators believe wiring educators to APSCN takes the magic out of running a school. It’s a rigid system. When everybody is legally bound to report every minute rule infraction, how can school principals act on their principles — exercising their own independent judgment and leadership within their community — without drawing unreasonable scrutiny from a faceless bureaucracy?
Don’t worry. There are ways to cheat the system.
Let’s say you’re the principal of a poor school with lots of bad kids. These dangerous elements are on a prison track, so leaving them with the kids who are actually trying to learn threatens what little good your school might actually accomplish.
Every classroom in your school is full, so teachers are always sending the disruptive kids to you. The teachers input behavioral incidents into the system like they’ve been trained to, then send kids to your office. After that, it’s out of their hands. Their days are long enough already.
As principal, the buck stops with you. So you keep the kids for a while, or you send them to in-school suspension. Maybe you try calling their parents, but that’s often a dead end. Sometimes you paddle their butts, since that’s a legal option in Arkansas. The kids get what they deserve, and the teachers get the “support” they’re constantly asking for.
After a while (maybe a few days of out-of-school suspension, if things were really bad) you send the kids back to class.
Here’s the tricky part: If you report all these exclusionary discipline actions (EDA’s) or incidents of corporal punishment to your superintendent and the ADE, they might think you’re not implementing “Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports,” or whatever buzzwords are currently trendy. You don’t want your neck sticking out next time Education Commissioner Johnny Key starts playing Whack-a-Mole with administrative jobs.
How can principals discipline students, appease teachers, and still report satisfactory numbers to the ADE at the end of the month?
Here’s what works:
- Direct teachers to document behavioral issues in eSchool, but not to discipline students themselves.
2. Deputize two or three teachers to help you administer student discipline. Pick the loyal ones, and pay them off with an extra $5000 stipend.
3. Implement disciplinary actions of your choice. Don’t let the classroom teachers review your actions, or they might get cold feet about sending bad kids to you for punishment.
4. Log into eSchool and delete portions of the teachers’ incident reports. Yeah, teachers might notice, but they’re not in charge. You are.
5. “Clean up errors pertaining to discipline” in eSchool, as directed by your Deputy Superintendent’s secretary. If anybody asks why you have so many incomplete reports to “clean up,” you can just blame the teachers for using APSCN improperly. No district or state administrator checks why discipline records were missing “an offender” or “an action” in the first place.
Five easy steps, and you’ve successfully defeated the inflexible bureaucracy! The students are under control, the teachers are appeased, and the superintendent can sleep knowing he won’t get in trouble with the ADE for reporting an unusually high number of EDA’s or corporal punishments.
With APSCN, it’s “Garbage in — Garbage out.” If the ADE is going to force everybody use this data reporting software, but not put any checks or balances on how people input the raw data in the first place, it’s their own fault if the results don’t match real life.
If things get too bad, you can always send the kids to an academic rehab program, or to jail. Nobody will be able to trace it back to you, because private nonprofits aren’t subject to the Freedom of Information Act, and juvenile criminal records are sealed.
Go home to your brand-new, half-million dollar house. You’ve done everything right to make your school look good, and it was all for the kids!
