Norris School District

Student Discipline Summary

It is a highly appropriate and necessary function of schools to regulate student conduct in order to provide an optimally safe and effective learning environment.  As a school with nearly 600 students, our high school bears many of the characteristics of a small town.  Our students are an increasingly diverse group and our student population is reflecting the growth of our community.  In the classroom, teachers daily encounter students who demonstrate varying levels of cooperation, commitment, and work habits.  Most of our students demonstrate outstanding learning behaviors.  They are engaged, participatory, and on task throughout the class period.  They seek help when needed, and complete assignments to or in excess of our high expectations.  As they grow intellectually and emotionally throughout their high school careers, our students become more self-directed in their learning and behave accordingly.  They take greater charge of and more ownership in their learning.  Additionally, our teachers are highly adept classroom managers for the most part.  While teaching techniques can always improve and be refined through ongoing professional development, my classroom observations typically confirm that our teachers have well-established classroom routines and expectations for individual, small group, and full class work.  Their behavioral expectations are clearly conveyed to students and are in accordance with our student code of conduct articulated annually in the handbook. 

While we deal with disciplinary incidents and student conflicts on a daily basis in the office, this involves a relatively small percentage of our students.  At Norris High School, we always operate on the premise that we do not have any ‘bad kids’ at Norris High School and I cringe when I hear others use this phrase to refer to any of our students.  In point of fact, most of the students in our high school never have a formal disciplinary referral or receive a serious disciplinary consequence.  Often, those who are exceptions demonstrate persistent problem behaviors and we work with these kids to acquire better social skills to behave appropriately in all settings.  As a school, we believe that, like classroom learning, social skills learning and an understanding of situational appropriateness is also a skill that can be taught and modeled by adults and learned by our students.

Some students do put themselves into the disciplinary mix of the school repeatedly.  Yet I genuinely believe that even these troubled students often desire to improve their conduct when the school is able to form a cooperative relationship with the student’s parents. 

The data collected from the first three quarters follows a fairly predictable trend: Students tend to demonstrate better compliance with school conduct expectations as they get older, grade by grade.  Of course, there’s also that lingering possibility that some of our older students just get more adept at evading consequences!  Whatever the case, the data indicates that seniors commit serious school rule violations at a rate of only about 1/4^th of that which freshmen do.  During the first three quarters, nearly 300 disciplinary incidents involving 9^th graders were processed.  Only a small fraction of that number of disciplinary incidents occurred involving our seniors. 

Suspensions and In School Suspensions: These serious disciplinary consequences are reserved for flagrant or repeated rule violations.  Through three-fourths of the school year, we had suspended about two dozen students from school and used an ISS placement for just over that number.  Suspensions from school are a serious consequence that is typically intended to achieve several objectives: (1) removing the student from the privilege of participation in the regular school setting for a short period of time (2) clearly demonstrating the school’s standard for acceptable conduct by sending a strong message about what is intolerable in an educational environment (3) deterring the student from engaging in these behaviors again.

DETENTIONS:

Detentions are the single most common consequence issued by our teachers.  On average, 500+ detentions have been served by students in the course of a typical year, and this year is on that pace.  Of course, as a point of clarification, many students never have to serve a detention – while we have a few students who have been assigned detentions nearly two dozen times this year!  Teachers have the discretion to assign detentions for a wide variety of minor disciplinary infractions.  These include tardies to class, inappropriate comments, failure to follow instructions, or off-task behaviors.  Administrators resort to detentions when the situation seems best addressed through this means rather than the stricter and more formal ISS or out of school suspension.  Students who are assigned detentions serve these after school.  If they fail to serve the detention in an expedient manner, their insubordination compels us to add additional time to the punitive consequence.  If there are extenuating circumstances that bar a student from serving after school detention time, then we will accommodate the situation for the student to serve the time before school or during lunch, but this is never our first resort.  Administrators leave detention assignments to the teachers and do not serve as a ‘court of appeals’ on detentions, despite the fact that some students want to avoid fulfilling the consequence and request that we ‘overturn’ the punishment. 

Change in placement or expulsion: Occasionally, circumstances warrant the most extreme disciplinary consequence, which are a long-term suspension or expulsion and a change in placement.  Nebraska state law stipulates that students be provided ongoing / continuing education even when under expulsion.  We typically only pursue this harshest of disciplinary consequences in situations where a highly flagrant act or persistent behaviors have demonstrated that the student is incapable of meeting basic behavioral expectations for our school.  We have two students currently on an alternate placement program.