Leading the Way to School Discipline Without Suspensions

Suspending a student is supposed to be a last resort. But because the city’s school discipline code allows for suspension when students “disobey authority” some troubled schools have used it to deal with all kinds of behavior issues.

M.S. 53 in Far Rockaway, Queens was one of those schools. The middle school was plagued with violence, low attendance and poor test scores for decades. Under a strict prior principal, teachers and staff were encouraged to suspend students in order to maintain order.

“Any little thing a child would be pulled out and suspended for,” said Grace Williams, the school’s math coach.

At the peak of the school’s suspension craze in 2010, M.S. 53 doled out 280 suspensions, even though there were just 500 students in the whole school.

Since that year, however, M.S. 53 has done an about face, dropping to just below 40 suspensions last year. Violent incidents have dropped. Test scores and attendance are climbing, too.

The catalyst for this dramatic change at M.S. 53 is Shawn Rux, an energetic principal who arrived in 2011. He’s recruited new teachers. He’s restructured the school to keep students of the same grade on one floor of the building when possible, to minimize student movement, and he’s divided some classes and lunch periods by gender.,

Beyond physical changes, Rux implemented a more holistic approach, one that's skeptical of suspensions as an effective tool for changing bad behavior.

“If you can find a different way to provide support, maybe through a behavior intervention plan, maybe through giving that student a call early in the morning to wake them up, maybe making sure the kid eats breakfast every morning or giving the kid a hug once a day,” Rux said. “Sometimes, that’s all it takes and behaviors can completely turn around.”