Arundel Schools May Add Parents to the Punishment

Students who break the rules in Anne Arundel County public schools may one day face a punishment that, for the typical kid, is far worse than detention: having to bring Mom or Dad to school with them for a day.

By Vikki Ortiz
Washington Post Staff Writer

The idea — essentially to embarrass students into good behavior without making them miss classroom time — came from a task force of 20 Anne Arundel parents, teachers and educators working to revise the Code of Student Conduct. A draft of the group’s proposals was presented to the county school board yesterday, and final approval of the code is due early next year.

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(This is a great idea with the unintended benefit of helping parents see the excellence that is a daily occurance in our classrooms as well as helping them understand how the support of education is so important to our future.- Russ)

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The vast majority of the suggested punishments are standard, echoing codes used by school systems across the country. But then there’s the clause proposing that a parent or guardian be required to tag along during a day of classes with any Anne Arundel student who has been caught disrupting class, skipping school or violating certain other rules.

"There was a general feeling that if kids knew something was, for sure, going to happen if they got out of line, and if it was something undesirable . . . then the odds of that behavior happening again are bound to go down," said Steve Johnson, a parent of two high school students and a member of the task force.

Undesirable? Try humiliating, said several students when told of the idea.

"That sounds horrible," declared Winters Geimer, 14, who is about to begin ninth grade at Annapolis High School. The thought of her parents roaming the school’s hallways for a day, she said, is "definitely up in the top five" worst things imaginable.

"My mom would probably try to act cool and tell us that we’re wearing fashions recycled from other generations," she said, "and my dad would probably get into fights with guys, telling them to stop looking at my butt."

The proposal has downsides for adults, too. Taking a day off from work would not be easy for some parents.

For others, it could throw carefully crafted child-care arrangement into chaos. "I’d be super annoyed if I had to take a day off in my life with four kids and everything," said Winters’s mother, Wendi Winters.

The task force members acknowledge that they haven’t discussed all the practical details, including how the school system could try to compel parents to cooperate with the punishment.

The larger point, they said, is that creative approaches to discipline sometimes end up being more meaningful to students.

"Even when students break a rule, there’s a learning opportunity," said Jose Torres, the school system’s director of student services, a task force member. "These are all part of a way of having students learn."

Other ideas under consideration by the task force: requiring students caught vandalizing property to work on the school grounds until they pay off the damage, and having students mop floors after school as punishment for skipping classes.

Amanda Dietz, 15, who attends Old Mill High School in Millersville, predicted that her male classmates would have a particularly hard time with the idea of parent-at-school punishment. "They can’t be all [tough] and cool with the girls they like when their moms are there," she said.

Several school board members said they favor the idea. Michael J. McNelly said he knows his daughter tends to act like a stranger when he visits her school as a board member. To her, he admits, he’s not exactly cool. Which is why the proposed punishment could work, he said.

"I think that parents, especially in middle and high school, need to get more involved with their children," McNelly said. "They need to be uncool."

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25665-2003Aug6.html