WESTFIELD – At last night’s Westfield School Committee meeting, Westfield High School Principal Jonathan Carter discussed an initiative called “Pathway to Good Standing”, an effort to discpline the actions of troublemakers on school grounds and to avoid suspending students.
“My job is to make sure that Westfield High School is the safest place kids and staff can go to,” said Carter. “We’re trying to provide a Pathway to Good Standing for some of our students who are chronic offenders against our school policies and procedures.”
“There are some students at Westfield High School who need to understand that part of being a good school citizen is to understand what good school citizenship is,” he said.
Carter said that the Pathway to Good Standing promotes attendance, discipline and academic performance, along with instilling personal responsibility and accountability.
“Getting to class on time and not being in the hallways, no referrals and for students who continue to not get with the program, there are steps for them to get where they need to be,” he said. “Suspension is the last resort. It puts kids out of the building. It takes time out of learning.
“Quite frankly, it disenfranchises kids that are already disenfranchised,” he said.
“My record speaks for itself. I don’t believe school suspensions and external suspensions are the answer,” he said referring to his time as a school administrator in Holyoke and Springfield. “I worked throughout my career at reducing suspensions and arrests and providing students with an asset-based approach. But we let them know that the adults run the building and are in charge of Westfield High School.”
School committee member Dr. Bill Duval asked Carter if there is currently discplinary uniformity at WHS, to which Carter yes.
“We have standard best practices for classroom management and district protocols on how to deal with certain infractions,” Carter said. “We want teachers to feel empowered and to have the autonomy to manage their classrooms in a way that is conducive for all students to learn.”
Carter said having adjustment and guidance counselors work with students has also helped some of his most at-risk students.
“We know that, in order for students to be successful, they need to have someone in the building they can trust,” he said. “We know a lot of students come to school with a lot of challenges outside of school – poverty, family issues, substance abuse. It’s hard to check those things at the door and focus on what the teacher is trying to teach you.”
“There aren’t any more caring individuals than the teachers at Westfield High School,” said Carter. “Our teachers go above and beyond. We’re not just teachers – we’re sometimes social workers, sometimes parents, sometimes friends and most people in our line of work embrace that and know that is part of the job.”
Committee member Kevin Sullivan asked for more clarification on what would constitute an out of school suspension.
“We have the positive alternative to the school suspension route, which is led by a teacher who can be a first responder to a kid in crisis,” Carter said. “Traditionally, these students would have been sent home to deal with whatever is going on with them on their own. This allows us to triage with a school adjustment counselor.”
“This is not a new idea. This is something that happens in high-performing schools,” said Carter after the meeting.
“We have high expectations for them but we support them in order to get there.”
“We have targeted interventions for kids who are struggling (academically), but I firmly believe, as do my fellow educators, that we need targeted interventions around social, emotional and behavioral concerns,” he said. “Those are the concerns that sometimes prevent students from accessing the curriculum they need in order to learn.”
“By not addressing the whole child, we’re not giving many of these kids an opportunity to be successful,” Carter said.
“The code of conduct is what it is. We still will suspend students, we still have zero tolerance for weapons, drugs and fighting,” he said.
Westfield Superintendent Dr. Suzanne Scallion reassured the committee that the district will still suspend if necessary.
“We are not going to tolerate any nonsense that makes anybody feel unsafe,” she said. “But once a student is suspended, we want to bring them back so they’re getting what they need.”
“This is formalizing that process,” she said.
Carter believes that there have been more suspensions this year than last year at this point, but he chalks this up to a number of factors.
“There’s a lot of talk in the education and medical worlds right now around ‘toxic stress’ and I can tell you that every kid who comes to Westfield High School and doesn’t have a good day, there’s been a reason for it,” he said. “They don’t wake up and say ‘I’m going to go to school and be a jerk today.’ What we’re trying to do is address the concern at it’s root cause.”
“The more we engage kids and the more we hold them accountable to our standards, the more we can help them,” he said.
