Holding the Torch

EMPOWERING PARENTS IS A CRITICAL ELEMENT TO HELPING TROUBLED CHILDREN

     Recently I was appointed to serve on the Virginia Advisory Counsel for Juvenile Justice.  This past week, we met in Norfolk for a two-day planning session and to review a number of juvenile justice programs.  Hosted by the Norfolk City Juvenile Court Services Unit, we met counselors and young people involved in programs focused on court diversion, truancy prevention and intensive community supervision for former gang members.  In every one of these programs, the staff told us that empowering parents to redirect their children was perhaps the single most important factor in determining a child’s success or failure.

     Getting parents involved in their child’s rehabilitation may seem to be a matter of common sense, but you would be surprised at the degree to which parents are ignored or marginalized as agency staffs take over.  In many school discipline cases, parents feel like bystanders as the school staff implements pre – ordained exclusionary consequences justified by school security.  In truancy cases, parents are often blamed as the cause of the problem.  Schools too often push these cases to court in hope that a judge can “make the child go to school.”  Such approaches are fragmented and miss a critical point – most children are primarily mentored by their parents or family members – for better or worse.  Making parents part of the solution is not always easy, but it starts with a policy commitment to never give up.

     The court programs in Norfolk were impressive and seemed to have significant success rates. Staff members were experienced and enthusiastic about what they were doing.  The children in the programs told us about what brought them to court and how they were genuinely optimistic about opportunities back in the community.  All talked about their family members who participated with them in the program.  Learning strategies to improve behavior was a family project.  The conversation was not just about dwindling resources in a tough economy; it was about finding new ways to empower parents to help kids in a collaborative effort.

     When school, social services and mental health agencies fall into patterns of marginalizing and blaming parents, children lose.  We could all learn more about a better way from the approaches demonstrated by the dedicated staff in the Norfolk Juvenile Court.

LISTENING TO A RECOMMENDATION FOR EXPULSION

     For years I have represented students and their parents before administrative panels and school boards in school expulsion cases. The cases had differences and varying degrees of severity but all involved some violation of school behavioral regulations.  It was the rote final recommendation of the school staff to the School Board members that was almost always the same… “We have no choice but to recommend expulsion in this case……”  Surely they have a choice.  They could recommend some reasonable way to avoid expulsion and everyone at the long table in the Board room knew it.  Why then is it so rare to see staff recommend creative disciplinary measures when they are sitting in the presence of the people who are elected to run the schools?

     Just being before the School Board for expulsion is a serious matter.  Only school boards have the legal authority to expel a student in Virginia.  To be expelled means you are out for 365 days. The first question often asked the student is “do you know what expulsion means”?  By the time the student is sitting with his parents in these sessions, all dressed up in a coat and tie, he knows.

     Expulsion procedures before school boards are more relaxed than a court proceeding but usually include “opening statements”, cross examination of the school officials and the student and “closing statements” by the superintendent’s designee and the parents.  It is rarely an exercise in solving the difficult problem of balancing the needs for school discipline while trying to keep one more student from being excluded from perhaps the only place she may have left to succeed.  It’s not supposed to be a trial but it sure feels like it, particularly when the staff is telling the Board they want this student out.

     Years ago I represented a student in an expulsion hearing before a school board in a rural jurisdiction.  The student had been jilted by his girlfriend and in a fit of adolescent, impulsive rage; he jotted down a quick note in his notebook about how he would like to “blow up his math class”.  He then finished his math quiz and went to the next class after accidently leaving his notebook, which was found by another student.  He was suspended, given a risk assessment, wrote an apology letter, but still found himself before the school board because staff could not recommend anything other than expulsion.

     After listening to the efforts the student made to take responsibility and show remorse for his transgression, the superintendent changed his expulsion recommendation and told the board he thought the student should be retained in school.  All would work to insure his success.  The board agreed.  I have not seen an administrator do that again in years of hearings.  Sometimes the school board elects to return a student to school contrary to the advice of the staff, but this is rare.  We should expect administrators to be creative and consider inclusion and retention in the hard cases. Don’t just routinely move to expel.