New School Safety and Order Assessment Tool

All right, I've got something new for you.

I spent all day working on this.

It's called the safety and order assessment.

And it's based on your comments is based on the trends I've seen in what is causing schools to have so much unsafe classroom behavior lately.

and specifically what schools are doing wrong, that up until this point, schools have not gotten wrong.

This is a solved problem that we're now unsolving and really causing chaos in a lot of schools as far as student violence.

So the four categories on that assessment are discipline matrix, violence exclusion, IEPs and behavior plans, and student responsibility and self-discipline.

And you can find a copy of this at principalcenter.com slash safe.

That's principalcenter.com slash safe.

That'll take you straight to the Google Docs.

And you can see what you think about that.

But the idea here is that we need to, with a discipline matrix, have clear expectations for behavior and clear consequences, escalating consequences for more severe or repeated behavior that can guide administrators in making decisions and not have them kind of make ad hoc discipline decisions based on how they want their statistics to turn out.

or you know if i have lower expectations for this student i'm not going to hold them accountable that kind of thing the second category again is violence exclusion the idea that when a student is violent they have to be out of class for a while it is not safe to keep a violent student in the class like this is obvious right that it is not safe to keep a violent student in the classroom with everybody else if they're throwing desks if they're hurting people uh so many of you have said i needed surgery after a student was violent with me and like we've got to put a stop to this kind of thing so Violence exclusion.

Another big category was IEPs and behavior plans.

The idea that if a student is on an IEP, you just have to accept violent behavior or nothing can be done.

Not true at all.

So there are some procedural things that we need to do to ensure that IEPs and behavior plans are actually working.

And if they're not working, that we modify them, change the plan so that everyone is kept safe.

And then the last category is student responsibility and self-discipline.

And this is where I feel like a lot of the attempts to be trauma-informed or be compassionate towards students have really turned into pity and have really turned into attempts to protect students from their own behavior in a way that doesn't transfer outside the school environment.

because it doesn't develop any kind of responsibility.

Like if the teacher is constantly blamed, if you're told you have to develop a relationship with the student, that's why they're being violent with you, because you haven't done a good enough job of that.

Well, that is not going to serve the student well in life at all.

So we've got to focus on solutions.

that develop self-control, that develop self-discipline.

So again, you can get this assessment and just go through it yourself.

There's nothing to opt in for, pop by or anything.

It's just a Google doc, principalcenter.com slash safe.

Let me know what you think.

Let me know if I missed anything.

This is a first draft.

I just wrote this for you today and I would love to hear from you.

Let me know what you think.