Effective New School Program Gives Parents a Classroom Assignment--Spending a Day Beside Their Errant Offspring

PITTSBURG, Calif. —  “It was humiliating . . . seriously,” groaned Holly Everts, describing what happened when she was suspended from Hillview Junior High School here earlier this year.

Instead of being banished from school--or as some kids say, instead of being invited to ditch school legally--Everts had to bring her mother with her to class for the day. And afterward, her mother threatened that if this ever happened again, she would personally demonstrate to both her daughter and to the entire student body the true meaning of the word humiliating.

“She said to me, ‘If you do this again, I’ll show you humiliating. I’ll come to school with you and I’ll have rollers in my hair. I’ll wear my bathrobe and my house slippers. And I’ll sit in class next to you and pick my nose,’ ” the seventh-grader recalled.

Needless to say, Holly Everts has not been suspended from school since and she’s confident her mother’s lounging ensemble will be modeled exclusively in their home.

Mom learned a few things, too. Said Diane Everts: “I have a lot more empathy for the teachers. Holly’s classes don’t seem very structured compared to when I went to school. It seemed like there was more chaos and confusion. It was sort of like a free-for-all. I read one of the notes that somebody slipped to Holly during class. It said, ‘How’s life in the embarrassing lane?’ ”

Welcome to junior high school discipline, circa 1987, a time when principals throughout the country are resorting to innovative and provocative means to cope with students born during the infamous “Me Decade.”

Hillview is just one of about 700 to 800 schools in the United states that have adopted variations on the face-suspension-or-bring-your-parent-to-class theme pioneered last year at Wilson Junior High School in Hamilton, Ohio.

But few schools have had results as dramatic as those at Hillview in Pittsburg, a city of about 40,000 located northeast of Oakland. Here, suspensions have decreased from as many as 25 on a bad day, to about six or seven a day. (In Ohio, when John Lazares instituted the program after becoming Wilson’s principal in January of 1986, the school was issuing three to five suspensions per day. Now, he said by telephone, “we sometimes go two or three days without suspending anybody.”)

At Hillview, where 65% of the students are members of minority groups, the idea was implemented last February--shortly after Principal Bob Guthrie read a blurb about the Ohio school’s program in Parade magazine.

“I was desperate,” he explained. “On some days, we were suspending 20 to 25 students out of 830, giving them one- to two-day suspensions. We had a lot of kids who ignored the idea of being suspended from school. We were giving an average of 100 to 120 tardy slips a day. We’d ring a bell and have students still standing in the hall. We tried a tardy lockout, in which late students would be locked out of class and would have to report to the office and then be assigned detention after school. They wouldn’t stay for detention after school.

Wanted to Be Suspended

“We’d call the students in and ask them why they didn’t go to detention and they’d say, ‘I want to be suspended. I didn’t feel like staying for detention.’ Sometimes they’d say, ‘Thank you, Mr. Guthrie. I need a couple of days off.’ ”

Guthrie, who will complete his third year as principal when the school year ends in late June, didn’t think twice about possible criticism for having parents attend classes with their children. “I thought, ‘What have we got to lose?’ I was pretty frustrated. These kids were flying high and somebody needed to clip their wings.”

The results speak for themselves. Guthrie said suspensions have decreased by an average of 60% (70% in April, before the weather got warmer and the kids got looser). The issuing of tardy slips has similarly declined from about 100 to 120 per day to nine or 10.

“The last time we checked before Easter, 48 of 50 students who had their parents come to school with them had not returned to the office (for behavior infractions). But it’s not 100%. Like all schools, we have a number of students who are out of control at home. The parents openly admit they can’t control their children. Sometimes, the kids are much bigger than their parents. And many of these parents will not come in with their children to school.”

(In that case, at Hillview, the student is suspended from school in the traditional manner. When parents spend a day at school, the suspension is removed from the student’s record.)

As many parents or teachers of junior high school-age (about 11 to 14) students will readily attest, kids at this stage often don’t even want to admit they have parents. And, as Guthrie expected, his charges were deeply mortified at the prospect of having their mothers or fathers observing them nonstop for an entire day in an arena generally off-limits to parents.

“Some of the scenes have been comical,” offered Guthrie, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Northeastern Oklahoma State University who refers to the food in the Hillview cafeteria as “Kibbles ‘n’ Bits.”

“The kids will try everything under the sun to avoid bringing their parents to school. They start crying and the mascara runs down their faces. They can turn it on and off. They say things like, ‘My mother will kill me.’ One girl had a tantrum. She lay down on the floor and started kicking and screaming when she realized that she was going to be suspended and her mother would be coming to school with her. One girl even said, ‘My mother told me if I get suspended she’s going to put me in a foster home.’ I told her that I was sure there were plenty of good foster homes in the area that would be happy to accept her.”

Most students are suspended for skipping after-school detention, which they can be sentenced to for arriving late in class, talking or otherwise misbehaving in class, chewing gum and other minor infractions. Weightier offenses--such as fighting, possession of drugs or weapons--result in the traditional suspension without option of a parental visit to remove the suspension from the student’s record.

While the girls have tended to attempt to persuade their principal not to suspend them in the first place, Hillview’s boys have more frequently tried to subvert the parental visitation program after it’s in full swing. More than one boy has simply taken off and abandoned a parent the instant a class is dismissed. One ingenious mother, deserted by her son, responded by yelling his name as he ran down the hall and calling even more attention to him. Other ditched parents have threatened to hug their sons publicly or hold their hands as they walk to the classes.

Parents interviewed about their days at school unanimously called the program an overwhelming success. Hillview teachers, too, like the increased parent-school contact that’s been a byproduct.

But the students, all of whom mentioned an unrelenting embarrassment factor, were mixed in their reviews. Some reluctantly admitted the parents-on-the-premises solution was obviously effective in improving all sorts of discipline problems at the school. But most could still not get past the overwhelming feeling of humiliation, despite the fact that it’s now fairly commonplace to sit next to the parent of one of their friends during class or lunch.

Seventh-grader Sage Ray, for example, who was suspended for attending basketball practice instead of detention, said he didn’t care much for the program or the embarrassment it brought to students.

His mother affirmed how difficult the day had been for her son. Recalled Irene Ray: “Nobody talked to him. Kids laughed and said, ‘Is that who I think it is?’ But it was a good experience for me. I’d been hearing these horror stories about how horrible and mean the teachers were and coming to school completely destroyed all the stories I’d heard. It was great for me because they told me I could come in and see the teachers or sit in on the classes anytime, not just when my son was suspended. I didn’t realize they welcome parents.”

Just how far has all this spread? According to John Lazares, who came up with the idea in Ohio, in addition to letters from 700 to 800 school districts using the program in the United States, he’s also heard from a U.S. Army base school in Spain that’s been inviting parents to share in their kids’ suspensions.

No schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District have implemented such a program, said spokesperson Eva Hain. And not even state Superintendent of Schools Bill Honig is sure if there have been any California schools other than Pittsburg’s Hillview willing to try it.

“I think it’s a terrific idea. There are a whole set of techniques like that to beef up discipline and they’re all powerful,” said Honig.

Asked is such tactics might be recommended for use in all California schools, Honig responded: “It’s something to consider. We have a state task force on discipline and safety. They have scads of those kinds of ideas.”

But, of course, few plans are perfect. At Hillview, there’s been little downside to having parents come to class with students, but some teachers have noticed that mothers and fathers can occasionally cause as much disruption as their kids. Cooking and French teacher Patty Johnson, who thinks junior high school-age students are often “like little adults and little children,” has found the same can sometimes be said for their parents. As she put it: “I had two cases where the parents have talked during class. The first one in particular, I wanted to put her name on the board.”