Once again, that is something that you have to get and then go on from
there. One cannot let discipline consume the entire school day, the
entire nine weeks, semester, or school year. And what has happened here
at Hillside we did have some discipline problems here when we first
arrived but this staff has gotten together and now we don't have
situations where kids are afraid to go in the restrooms or kids afraid
to walk from one classroom area to another. We have a specific
discipline policy. Kids know what is going to happen to them if they are
late for school; they know what is going to happen to them if they are
on the hall without passes; they know what is going to happen to them if
they caught with matches or a cigarette lighters in their pockets; all
of that is in writing to them and that is discussed with them by me the
first thirty minutes that this student body is together any school year.
That is the first thing that they hear because we begin discipline the
moment that we walk out of the auditorium to begin our school year. The other part of that is that we have gone another
step here at Hillside and we have a student mediation program here that
we started two years ago. In that student mediation program we have
trained 28 students and when there is a confrontation that does not
require being sent home and if it happened in the community overnight or
on the weekend, mediation can occur by being referred by your classmates
or teachers, Reverand from your church or what have you, and we put the
parties involved in a room with the student mediators and we have an
adult who will sit on the outside of that room but does not enter into
the mediation. These student mediators who have been trained will
present to me at the mediation a report. If it is solved, then they are
allowed to go on to their classes without any administrative
interference. If it is not solved, then the administrators get into it
and 97% of our cases that have gone to mediation since we started two
years ago have ended in non-administrative interference.
This particular year it has grown so that the Mental Health Center with
whom we began it, we now have an on-site person who is available to us
now at all times although we do share it now with the other high school
who is trying to develop a program like ours at this time. So that is
how we discipline.