A West Virginia middle school has introduced a new disciplinary system in a bid to curb challenging behaviour amongst the school’s most difficult students. They call it the Reverse Suspension.
Now, students at Huntington East Middle School, who have been disciplined for non-violent and non-verbally abusive behaviour, are not suspended and kept home from school. Instead, the school offers parents the option of undertaking a ‘reverse suspension’.
This means that instead of kids being stopped from coming to school, the student’s parent is given the chance to spend an entire day at school with their child. Since being instigated, the program has been embraced by both parents and students, with those on all sides taking note of behavioural improvements and changes in student attitude.
The principal of the school, Frank Barnett, said that the reverse suspensions had been responsible for reducing student suspensions by two-thirds, and bad behaviour episodes by more than half.
He said that for many troublesome students, the suspension was actually something they wanted, to have a break from the school environment. With the reverse suspension, an offer that around 30 families have opted for this year alone, kids no longer dictate the course of action.
One parent, Stephanie Howell, applauded the idea as an effective way to deal with middle schoolers:
“Who as a parent wants to sit in class? It’s embarrassing. It’s a good motivator to not have your parents come and sit with them.”
Even the kids are seeing the improvements from the change, with one student, Justin Young, admitting that he was suspended multiple times last year, but this year, he hasn’t been suspended once following his mum coming to spend the day with him during a reverse suspension.
Why We Think It’s A Great Idea
It’s hard to believe that schools are only just starting to catch onto the idea that some kids want to be suspended, and that even having the behavioural black mark on their record is worth a day or two off school.
A program like this is a great idea because it forces some kids to reconcile the disruptive person they might be at school, with the loving and obedient child they might be at home. For other kids, the sheer embarrassment of having your mum or dad come to school and hang around with you all day, should be enough to stamp out bad behaviour entirely.
So while this program does have some downsides, the most obvious of which is that it requires a parent to be available to spend the entire day at school, it’s a really clever idea that actually stands to have a positive impact on a student’s behaviour.
We’d love to see a similar ‘reverse suspension’ program in place at middle schools in Australia, to help in dealing with problematic behaviour before it sees some kids fall so far behind others. In cases where parents can’t spend the entire day with their child, perhaps a part-day system could be put into place.
