Fix the broken discipline rules in state schools

When it comes to childrearing, and to taking care of children who aren’t your own, you expect a little push.

Comes with the territory. Natural rivals, kids and their elders.

Then, when push comes to shove, you also expect, as the adult in the room, to be able to take measures, which may mount from a strong recommendation to “Use your words!” to variously more punitive steps.

If those steps are taken away from you? Well, everyone loses. Chaos ensues.

But in California’s increasingly rule-less environment on our public school campuses, thanks to certainly well-meaning edicts aimed at reversing sometimes cruel disciplinary paradigms in which the rod was rarely spared, students, including very young ones, can shove all they like to, and not have to face consequences.

As we’ve noted recently in this space, efforts by lawmakers in the Legislature and by some school administrators have increasingly leaned toward eliminating traditional options of sending children home, longer suspensions and possible expulsions of even students who are being even “willfully disobedient.”

And as reporting by Jenny Gold in the Los Angeles Times earlier this month showed, some California schoolchildren of the very youngest ages have discovered that consequently they can get up to classroom and playground shenanigans of the highest order, with teachers having little or no disciplinary recourse.

One administrator of state preschools in Mendocino County says that some of the children she nominally oversees have been acting out, big-time: “Biting has become more frequent among the 3-year-olds. Hitting and kicking are commonplace. A few children have started hurling wooden blocks and even chairs across the classroom. In at least a third of her 17 classrooms, she said, the behaviors may endanger other children and teachers.”

Clearly, this experiment in the lab that is our public schools needs to be pulled off the Bunsen burner, and rethought.

In the past, the administrator “might have called a parent to come pick up their ill-behaved child early. Now her options are limited, and preschools like hers must manage difficult behaviors on their own.”

The problem is nationwide as well. In 2014, the federal Education Department issued a statement that condemned the practice of expelling the worst-behaving preschoolers, and said that the practice was banned at all federally funded Head Start programs.

California and at least 28 other states now have policies that stop or severely limit the ability to expel students at all grade levels.

“Schools must go through a specific series of steps and work with a family before removing a child from school, and families have a right to appeal such decisions, a process that can take more than six months,” Gold reports.

One problem — a huge one — is that the calls to parents asking for a pick-up of a child who is having a bad day are off the table, too: that’s considered suspension.

For the administrator in Mendocino, that means that even “separating the child from the group is difficult, because the law requires that a fully qualified teacher be with them, rather than an aide. In her small centers, there just aren’t enough high-level staff.”

We realize that, just as children can be problematic, expulsion creates trauma in itself. There’s no hiding from data that shows kids “expelled from child care settings are 10 times as likely to drop out of high school, and face an increased risk of later being incarcerated.”

We must protect children, and throwing them permanently out of school multiplies their problems. But this system is broken. There has to be some recourse for teachers and administrators in order to protect the other children getting hit by those flying blocks — and chairs.