Pro Publica investigated the case of a child at Success Academy who was disruptive and learned that at a charter school, the chain is free to write its own disciplinary rules. The public schools are governed by regulations, but Success Academy is exempt from those regulations.
ProPublica told the story of Ian, whose mother left work repeatedly to find out why Success Academy had called the police about the child. It seems clear that the school was trying to persuade her to withdraw Ian. But she kept showing up. It also seems clear that Ian’s behavior got worse because of the school’s rigid discipline.
In a panic, if she floors it, Marilyn Blanco can drive from her job at the Rikers Island jail complex to her son Ian’s school in Harlem in less than 18 minutes.
Nine times since December, Blanco has made the drive because Ian’s school — Success Academy Harlem 2 — called 911 on her 8-year-old.
Ian has been diagnosed with ADHD. When he gets frustrated, he sometimes has explosive tantrums, throwing things, running out of class and hitting and kicking anyone who comes near him. Blanco contends that, since Ian started first grade last year, Success Academy officials have been trying to push him out of the school because of his disability — an accusation similar to those made by other Success Academy parents in news stories, multiple lawsuits that resulted in settlements and a federal complaint.
When giving him detentions and suspensions didn’t stop Ian’s tantrums, Blanco said, the school started calling 911. If Blanco can’t get to Ian fast enough to intervene, a precinct officer or school safety agent from the New York Police Department will hold him until an ambulance arrives to take him to a hospital for a psychiatric evaluation — incidents the NYPD calls “child in crisis” interventions.
The experience has been devastating for Ian, Blanco said. Since the 911 calls started late last year, he’s been scared to leave his house because he thinks someone will take him away. At one ER visit, a doctor wrote in Ian’s medical file that he’d sustained emotional trauma from the calls.
Citywide, staff at the Success Academy Charter School network — which operates 49 schools, most of them serving kids under 10 years old — called 911 to respond to students in emotional distress at least 87 times between July 2016 and December 2022, according to an analysis of NYPD data by THE CITY and ProPublica.
If Success Academy were run by the city Department of Education, it would be subject to rules that explicitly limit the circumstances under which schools may call 911 on students in distress: Under a 2015 regulation, city-run schools may never send kids to hospitals as a punishment for misbehavior, and they may only involve police as a last resort, after taking mandatory steps to de-escalate a crisis first. (As THE CITY and ProPublica reported this month, the rules don’t always get followed, and city schools call 911 to respond to children in crisis thousands of times a year.)
But the regulation doesn’t apply to Success Academy, which is publicly funded but privately run and — like all of the city’s charter school networks — free to set its own discipline policies.
The consequence, according to education advocates and attorneys, is that families have nowhere to turn if school staff are using 911 calls in a way that’s so frightening or traumatic that kids have little choice but to leave.
“Sure, you can file a complaint with the Success Academy board of trustees. But it isn’t going anywhere,” said Nelson Mar, an education attorney at Legal Services NYC who represented parents in a 2013 lawsuit that led to the restrictions on city-run schools.
Success Academy did not respond to questions about the circumstances under which school staff generally call 911 or the criteria they use to determine whether to initiate child-in-crisis incidents.
Regarding Ian, Success Academy spokesperson Ann Powell wrote that school staff called EMS because Ian “has repeatedly engaged in very dangerous behavior including flipping over desks, breaking a window, biting teachers (one of whom was prescribed antibiotics to prevent infection since the bite drew blood), threatening to harm both himself and a school safety agent with scissors, hitting himself in the face, punching a pregnant paraprofessional in the stomach (stating ‘I don’t care’ when the paraprofessional reminded him that ‘there’s a baby in my belly’), punching a police officer and attempting to take his taser, and screaming ‘I wish you would die early.’”
Powell also provided documentation that included contemporaneous accounts of Ian’s behavior written by Success Academy staff, photographs of bite marks and a fractured window, an assessment by a school social worker concluding that Ian was at risk for self-harm, and a medical record from an urgent care facility corroborating the school’s account that a teacher had been prescribed antibiotics.
Blanco said that Success Academy administrators have regularly exaggerated Ian’s behaviors. When he was 6, for example, Ian pulled an assistant principal’s tie during a tantrum, and school staff described it as a choking attempt, according to an account Blanco gave to an evaluator close to the time of the incident. Each time Success Academy has sent Ian to an emergency room, doctors have sent him home, finding that he didn’t pose a safety threat to himself or others, medical records show. (Success Academy did not respond to questions about the assertion that staffers have exaggerated Ian’s behaviors.)
Blanco knows that Ian is struggling. No one is more concerned about his well-being than she is, she said. But villainizing her 8-year-old only makes the situation worse.
“It’s like they want to tarnish him,” Blanco said. “He’s just a child, a child who needs help and support.”
Blanco chose Success Academy because she wanted Ian to have better education that what’s available in his neighborhood public school.
Success Academy, which has avid support from many parents and is led by former New York City Councilmember Eva Moskowitz, promotes itself as an antidote to educational inequality, offering rigorous charter school options to kids who might not have other good choices. On its website, the network advertises its students’ standardized test scores (pass rates for Black and Latino students are “double and even triple” those at city-run schools) and its educational outcomes: 100% of high school graduates are accepted to college, the network says.
Success Academy administrators say that strict and consistent discipline policies are essential to kids’ learning. Students are required to follow a precise dress code and to sit still and quietly, with hands folded in their laps or on their desks. When students break the rules, the school issues a progressive series of consequences, including letters home, detentions and suspensions.
Once students are accepted through the Success Academy lottery, the network is required to serve them until they graduate or turn 21, unless they withdraw or are formally expelled…
In Harlem, Ian started struggling at Success Academy just a few weeks into first grade. He’d never been aggressive before he started school, Blanco said. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, he’d attended kindergarten online. When schools went back to in-person instruction, he was a high-energy 6-year-old who couldn’t follow Success Academy’s strict rules requiring him to sit still and stay quiet. By the end of first grade, he’d been suspended nearly 20 times.
The more Ian got in trouble, the worse he felt about himself and the worse his behavior became, Blanco said. He started falling behind because he missed so much class time during his suspensions, according to his education records. At home and at school, he said that teachers disciplined him because he was a “bad kid.”
At first, Blanco worked hard to cooperate with the school, she said. She was worried by the change in Ian’s behavior, and she thought that school staff had his best interests at heart. But then an assistant principal called her into an office and told her that Success Academy wasn’t a “good fit” for Ian, Blanco said to THE CITY and ProPublica, as well as in a written complaint she sent to Success Academy at around that time. (Success Academy’s board of trustees investigated the complaint and did not find evidence of discrimination against Ian, according to a September 2022 letter to Blanco from a board member.)
“That didn’t sit right,” said Blanco, who is an investigator at Rikers Island and is accustomed to gathering paper trails. She asked the assistant principal to put the statement in writing, but he told her she had misunderstood, she said. (Success Academy did not respond to questions about this incident.)
Several times, when the school called Blanco to pick Ian up early, staff told her to take him to a psychiatric emergency room for an evaluation. But the visits didn’t help, Blanco said. “You could be sitting there for six, seven, eight hours,” waiting to talk to a psychologist. Because Ian never presented as an immediate threat to himself or others, hospital staff couldn’t do much but refer him to outpatient care and send him home, according to hospital discharge records.
Eventually, Blanco found an outpatient clinic that would accept her insurance to evaluate Ian for neurological and behavioral disorders. She said she begged school staff to stop disciplining Ian while she worked to get him treatment, but the suspensions were relentless. Once, he missed 15 straight days of school.
At the beginning of Ian’s second grade year, Blanco reached out to Legal Services NYC, where Mar, the education attorney, took her on as a client.
The school twice reported Blanco to child welfare services as a negligent mother. An investigator came to her home to interview her and Ian. She said she was humiliated.
One month after the child welfare visit, things got even worse. Blanco was in Queens, heading to work to pick up some overtime, when the school called to say that Ian had had another tantrum. This time, she was too late to bring Ian home herself. He was in an ambulance, on his way to Harlem Hospital….
Two weeks ago, Success Academy sent Blanco an email informing her that they requested a hearing to have Ian removed from school for up to 45 school days because he “is substantially likely to cause injury to himself and others while in the Success Academy community.”
Ian would be barred from Success Academy immediately, the email said, even though it could take up to 20 days to schedule the hearing, which will be held at the special education division of the city’s Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings. If the hearing officer agrees with Success Academy, Ian will miss the rest of the school year..
To Blanco, the hearing seems like just another way for the school to get rid of her son. She thinks about pulling Ian out of Success Academy all the time, she said, but it feels like there’s no good alternative. She doesn’t want to give up on the idea of him getting a better shot than the one she got at a failing neighborhood school.
“I want him to get free of this cycle of disadvantage,” Blanco said. “I want to fight for my son’s rights and let them know that you’re not going to treat my child this way. I’ve made it my mission. You don’t get to pick and choose who you give an education to.”
.
So why would this parent fight so hard to keep her kid in a place where the kid is abused? Are conditions in the alternative so miserable that there is no real alternative?
This seems a tale of competing narratives. On one hand, there is the Success Academy narrative that there is a particular child they can serve and this child is not in that group. One the other hand there is Blanco’s narrative that Success has at least exacerbated the behavior that they deplore. On the other hand (cue Tevya in Fiddler on the Roof) there is the narrative of the failing school. Not to mention the narrative of the attempted takeover of public institutions by figures who want to direct society philosophically or want to direct money into their own pocket.
No wonder there is such a thing as a novel.
Tevye. I guess autocorrect is not well versed in literature.
Autocorrect is not familiar with Broadway musicals.
“So why would this parent fight so hard to keep her kid in a place where the kid is abused?
I was wondering that myself. Sounds like parental ego – she’s out to prove that the school can’t drive her away. Only she’s sacrificing her son’s wellbeing to prove it. Sad.
Maybe she is fighting for ALL kids.
Maybe she is fighting for her own son’s well-being?
It is only parents brave enough as she is who are willing to speak out that will change things.
She can speak out all she wants. She doesn’t have to leave her child in an abusive environment to do that.
I agree, Dienne. It must be very traumatic to the child to be picked up by police or an ambulance so frequently.
The school will keep it up until they wear her down.
Roy,
It does seem like Success Academy made his emotional issues much worse. Damn the test scores. The child should not be in a school where they call the police whenever he acts up. This may be the consequence of having so many teachers who are young and inexperienced.
It is clear that is exactly what Success Academy did. There are difficult 5 year olds in lots of schools, but schools that WANT to help them, know how to do so.
At Success Academy, the school is not looking to help the kid, they are looking to dump the kid. Every action they take is to further the child’s misery.
NYT April 15, 2015:
“In an internal email that some former teachers said typified the attitude at some schools, one school leader said that students who were lagging should be made to feel “misery.”
It is documented that “feeling misery” seems to be the way that Success Academy believes is how to handle students.
The “misery” is the point.
It is certainly possible that some students get severely disciplined and humiliated and it works.
It is also clear from the evidence, that making a child feel “misery” leads to a charter whose attrition rates are disproportionately high and thus graduates a tiny fraction of the student who begin there.
Which tells you that making a child who acts out “feel misery” is also likely to make that child act out even more and then even more. Until Success Academy congratulates itself on having a reason to call the police or even worse, to call ACS on a parent who is obviously not abusive.
I can’t think of anyone more despicable than Success Academy administrators like Ann Powell, who are very generously compensated for publicly trashing and demonizing very young students like Ian. Reading someone who calls herself a “park slope mom” going out of her way to demonize an 8 year old child to cover up for the fact that Success Academy seems to have provided this student with nothing but “misery” is truly disgusting. What a horrible person she must be to scapegoat a child – and his mother – for the failures of the charter school that pays her so much money.
Roy asked the same questions I was thinking as I read the piece.
“So why would this parent fight so hard to keep her kid in a place where the kid is abused?
“Are conditions in the alternative so miserable that there is no real alternative?”
“It’s like they want to tarnish him.”
Success Academy is building a case against the child and family to justify “counseling out” or expelling special needs child, Ian. The school is also using the police and mental health services to create a paper trail to document Ian’s behavior. This school is quite skilled at using public services to get what it wants. Moskowitz knows how to tap funding from NYC’s elite and manipulate the system to achieve her goals. Is she a distant relative of Ron DeSantis? The price for her goal is to drag a poor family and child through the family court system regardless of the impact it has on them. This whole unfortunate traumatic experience could have been avoided if the school had hired specialists to address Ian’s needs and placed him in a setting that could have accommodated those needs. However, meeting Ian’s needs would have cost the school money, and it would have cut into Success Academy’s profits.
““I want him to get free of this cycle of disadvantage,” Blanco said. “I want to fight for my son’s rights and let them know that you’re not going to treat my child this way. I’ve made it my mission. You don’t get to pick and choose who you give an education to.”
Success Academy is a private school that does get to “pick and choose” those they will serve, and it is generally those they believe that have the most potential and will cost the least to educate.
“Sure, you can file a complaint with the Success Academy board of trustees. But it isn’t going anywhere.”
No, actually, it is … right into Trusteee Joe Belluck’s wastebasket.
Just do it doesn’t get lost in all the italics above:
I can imagine a very different type of story about at a district school where exasperated parents of other students say, “Why don’t you just call 911!” And the principal says “We aren’t permitted to do that.”
You can “imagine” that?? Why? Because there are thousands of NYC public school kindergarten and first grade students – and hundreds of kindergarten and first grade teachers – getting injured by their 5 year old classmates and 5 year old students because the school didn’t call 911?
While you obviously had a perfect child with perfect friends, most parents who don’t have perfect children and perfect friends like yours know that “calling 911” is doing nothing to handle these incidents. It simply makes the situation worse.
Most parents don’t believe a 5 year old who hits their kid needs to be hospitalized and 911 called. They want the school to handle it in a way that works, not in a way that never works except if the intention is to cause even more emotional distress to an obviously troubled child.
It is amazing how many 5 year olds who acted out in Kindergarten – but the school managed them – turned into lovely students.
Success Academy REQUIRES parents to jump through hoops before their child is allowed to enroll.
These 5 year old students don’t enroll in Success Academy as the troubled, violent, dangerous children that Eva Moskowitz says they are, and that those who are implicitly racist believe they are.
At Success Academy, students who struggle to behave at age 5 are humiliated and punished and made to feel horrible about themselves, and they act out or hurt themselves.
Public schools understand that “calling 911” doesn’t do anything for these kids.
Eva Moskowitz has so much money and she spends it promoting herself and her brand instead of spending it to teach ALL students, even the ones who may need more help to behave. “Help” is not an inexperienced twenty-something who was told that “punishment” and “humiliation” is the only proper response. Help is understanding and empathy and experts addressing their issues.
I am still trying to wrap my head around the parent whose kid gets bit by another kid in Kindergarten being angry that the school didn’t call 911 to arrest the biter. Maybe flerp! knows those kinds of parents.
Calling 911 is an admission of failure on the part of the school. They should have teachers trained to calm down kids likeIan.
And yet, FLERP, every emergency room they sent Ian to said he had no issues. Do you believe the professionals or the Success Academy staff that obviously wants him gone?
Frankly I find the entire story rather opaque and don’t feel confident in adjudicating the issue.
There are enough details to see that if the youngster being discussed were a student at my public school, he would have a one on one Behavior Intervention Implementation specialist working with him to support his Behavior Intervention Plan and his Individualized Education Plan, so that he would feel more comfortable at school with more breaks than the insanely restrictive system that is the driver of Success Academy data-driven abuse.
I doubt that SA has anyone on staff that has the training to help Ian. That’s why they keep calling the police. It says more about the staff than the child.
He would meet with a psychologist every couple weeks and also have access to emotional and athletic coaches during lunch and after school. He would be given outlets in time to complete classwork at his own pace without punishing him for his special needs. If he started to act out, he would be able to talk a walk with his BII before anyone had the numbers 9-1-1 cross his or her mind.
There are enough details to see that if he were a student at my law abiding public school, there wouldn’t be that much of a problem, and if he were my student, I surmise he would be happily learning by doing his best most days, and being accepted by his classmates and me the other times.
Success Academy seems to deal with all problems one way only. Punishment is all they know. They are outmoded, stuck in the early 19th century.
Harsh discipline, then suspension.
From an April 2015 NYT article on Success Academy:
“In an internal email that some former teachers said typified the attitude at some schools, one school leader said that students who were lagging should be made to feel “misery.”
The misery is the point. The got to go list is the point. The teacher that was caught on video demonstrating exactly the techniques that Success Academy loves so much they designated her a “model teacher” is the point.
Teaching kids who don’t give you bragging rights is NOT the point. Teachers and administrators who believe it is the point are soon shown the door.
FLERP! says:
“Frankly I find the entire story rather opaque and don’t feel confident in adjudicating the issue.”
Just fyi, flerp and I first butted heads when flerp! used to vehemently belittle and attack me whenever I posted anything critical of Eva Moskowitz and Success Academy. It got so I suspected for a while that flerp! was Eva Moskowitz or maybe Ann Powell.
I didn’t really understand why flerp! felt so strongly that Success Academy needed to be defended at all costs.
There used to be someone named “Tim” who was similar to flerp!, always attacking anyone who criticized Success Academy.
But even “Tim” came to realize that Success Academy had no integrity and grew to be disgusted with them.
flerp! just stopped chiming in about Success Academy except for very rare times when flerp! feels very compelled to distract from a negative article about them.
You will notice that FLERP! repeated Ann Powell’s demonizing characterization of Ian to make his/her point that many parents would not want a kid like that in class with their kid.
And then flerp! ends with “Frankly I find the entire story rather opaque and don’t feel confident in adjudicating the issue.”
This situation with Success Academy is a lot less opaque than most things that flerp! feels perfectly fine strongly criticizing.
If you don’t know flerp!’s long history defending Success Academy and Eva Moskowitz, you might take his/her comments as thoughtful and reasonable. But even “Tim” eventually could say something critical of Success Academy. flerp! never can. And if flerp’s defense of Success Academy is called out, he/she defers to saying the situation being just too confusing for him/her to comment.
I used to defend Bill de Blasio, but I could still be critical of him. flerp! could never be critical of Eva Moskowitz and Success Academy. I don’t know why the copious evidence over the years never led to flerp! changing his/her mind, but given that even “Tim” changed his mind and would criticize Success Academy instead of defending it, I wonder if there is a personal reason.
Why didn’t Powell include documentation of all the ways that Success Academy used to help this child? Instead of documentation of all the “bad” things she says this child did?
Interesting that Ann Powell could document this child’s so-called bad actions for the public, but couldn’t document what Success Academy administrators did to help him. Except the multiple suspensions and calling 911.
“punching a pregnant paraprofessional in the stomach (stating ‘I don’t care’ when the paraprofessional reminded him that ‘there’s a baby in my belly’)”
I get that Ann Powell included that story to demonize a young child and absolve Success Academy of blame, but her adding the “I don’t care” statement by a young child to demonize him is a prime example of everything that is wrong with these soulless people having anything to do with children.
The way one handles a young child (NOT an adult or even a much older child) who is in so much distress that they hit a teacher is NOT to say “there’s a baby in my belly” and then present the child as an evil demon because the little kid said “I don’t care.” It doesn’t surprise me that a struggling child would become much worse if Success Academy’s “expert” way of handling a child who is experiencing so much distress that he hits a teacher is for that person to tell the child “there’s a baby in my belly” and then treat his “I don’t care” response as if it was proof of the demon seed that was inherent in this child’s make up, instead of a fairly typical response by a very distressed young child crying out for help.
I realize that Ann Powell seemed to hope that readers would embrace her attempt to characterize this child as a demon child, but it only shows the lack of empathy that seems to be a precondition to rising to the upper ranks at Success Academy.
That comment told us nothing about the child, but it told us a lot about the administrators at Success Academy and about Ann Powell herself.
I wonder if that anecdote actually happened.
Success Academy likes to present a child’s actions in the worst possible way to demonize them PUBLICLY. There is absolutely nothing surprising about a young child in the midst of a tantrum saying “I don’t care” under those circumstances, EVEN IF THEY DO CARE! There is something VERY wrong with educators responding to a young child saying “I don’t care” in those circumstances as if he is the devil AND for Ann Powell to publicly trash that young child as if his saying “I don’t care” proves he really is the devil.
THAT is the biggest red flag to me. This child feels that hatred and disgust from Success Academy administrators and teachers who don’t have an ounce of empathy, who think of him as something to toss out with the garbage as soon as they can. And then they have the chutzpah to wonder why he gets worse.
Remember, Eva Moskowitz said this to John Merrow in the PBS Newshour report on their high suspension rates of 5 and 6 year old children:
“I often have parents say to me, my child never punched the teacher. I say, well, but you weren’t there.”
Eva Moskowitz doesn’t just say that very young Success Academy students OFTEN punch their teachers. She says that Success Academy students punch their teachers so frequently that the smaller cohort of parents who are skeptical that it happens comprise such a huge number of parents that she OFTEN has them deny it and she OFTEN has to tell them they weren’t there.
Ian is only one in a long, long line of Success Academy very young children who Eva Moskowitz tells the public act out so violently that they “punch” their teachers. OFTEN.
If your charter school requires parents to jump through multiple hoops to enroll their child, and your heartless administrators are claiming that these students whose parents jump through hoops OFTEN punch their teachers, then there is something wrong with the school. The fact that the SUNY Charter Institute and the education reporters at the NYT and Chalkbeat, etc. accept without question Success Academy’s claims that there is something wrong with the 5 year olds who win the lottery is nothing more than implicit racism.
No other charter school in NYC claims to have such violent 5 and 6 year olds as Success Academy does. Their administrators would rather throw young children under the bus than admit their own failures.
This brings so many thoughts…Perhaps, in an instant of humility, Success Academy could admit that schooling isn’t as easy as they make it out to be. That public schools have a tough mission and attempting to try to make individual students go away isn’t so “successful”. My perspective as a principal reminds me of many similar cases we faced in my schools.
My last year at my first principal assignment in Huntsville, we had a profound uptick of students in the early grades whose default response to any level of redirection was hitting the adult. We struggled with these students. My staff, for the most part, loved these kids. We understood they were dealing with circumstances at home, if they had a home, that brought these children to a level of desperation they could not handle. We had a time out room that many of these children ransacked as soon as they were put there. We had a thoughtful and caring adult who took these students under her wing when they were sent there. She also worked with them when they weren’t in trouble. The students loved her and knew she wanted to help, yet they continued to lash out. What I was witnessing was happening with greater frequency across the district and not just under circumstances of poverty. The principals’ had a great discussion with the Superintendent begging for some level of mental health support at the schools. The money wasn’t there. I tried to empathize and seek solutions with parents because I was a challenge through grade four. However, the difference was that I was just talkative. I remained respectful. The contemporary behaviors we were witnessing were dangerous.
Many in public often refer to the good old school days with the paddle forgetting that for chronic misbehavior corporal punishment didn’t work either. As a new teacher back in the fall of 1982, the principal at my school came in and paddled a half dozen of my ninth graders who were having their way with this green horn. They behaved for about 1 week and were soon back to their old tricks. As a teacher and principal I learned that discipline in the classroom depended on a number of factors including trust, conveying a level of preparation that shows a teacher cares, and an understanding that a level of obstinance is required to show students a teacher cares. Every year my disciplinary problems decreased until I had almost none, but it took a significant learning curve to get me there. I have worked in tough and compliant school settings. In all of these environments there were teachers who rarely had discipline issues. The common trait in all of these classrooms was that the students knew the teacher would never quit on them. What I discovered as a principal filling a staff was that too many young teachers were unprepared for these challenges. Many young teachers come in believing that students are going to follow their lead without question. New teachers don’t understand that they may have to prove their metal through care and attention facing tough days while figuring this out. What happens too often is the shock of this experience runs many teachers with potential away.
As with the many commentaries we read on this blog concerning reading, there is no single solution to improve school discipline. However, we do have the tools before us that could enhance the possibility. We could start by not giving new teachers a full load when they join the profession while providing opportunities to observe and have conversations with master teachers. Reducing class size would certainly help teachers along with a staff of counselors and therapists that can help the child and teacher adjust to challenges. Wrap around services that include family counseling could provide strategies for the parents and engender a partnership with the school while raising their child. Nowhere in this article did we see any meaningful help for the parent who wanted her son to be successful. Time out, isolation, and suspension strategies rarely work. If it doesn’t exacerbate the problem by creating poor self image, it simply delays the inevitable behaviors that are the only way the child knows how to respond to distress. Good school discipline requires a community of adults and children who provide a safe environment for a struggling child. It requires hard work and an understanding that disciplinary challenges are not only difficult for the adults but doubly difficult for the child.
Many on this blog have profound issues with the Charter School movement, and for good reason. However, what this circumstance really demonstrates is that we as a culture are too often unwilling to provide the resources needed for a child and family under duress. I profoundly hurt for every child and teacher facing these circumstances. I would take steps to alleviate the situation, but most importantly, I would work to be present. Too often public school districts have attempted to be “no excuses” or unbending in their approach to disciplinary crisis when what we really need is more people better prepared to build the relationships that reduce the likelihood behavioral extremes
Well said. It important to not give up on students and forge a relationship with them.
Thanks, Paul. A lot of us within driving distance of Huntsville see it as an island of upper crust engineers. You leave us with a lot to digest in this essay
As with most cities of any size, Huntsville is now the largest in Alabama, there is a large segment of families who struggle as poorly paid service workers. The social ills seen in cities across the country come with the same level of neglect.
Our daughter, now attending Hunter College & working PT as an assistant teacher in a NYC middle school, has ADHD, expressive/receptive language disorders, & other learning disabilities. From kindergarten through HS, she attended a private school specializing exclusively in special needs students, paid for by the NYC Dept. of Education. Student are from all NYC boroughs. There are several such private special needs schools in NYC, with occupational, physical, & speech therapists on staff, as well as psychologists & a nurse who administers any medications prescribed by students’ physicians. Classes & programs are designed to accommodate special needs, & many students go on to attend top colleges.
In her early years, our daughter had tantrums similar to Ian’s, but rarely, if ever, had them at school because they knew how to de-escalate.
There’s a process to have a special needs student enrolled in such a program. We’re fortunate that my wife was a NYC school social worker. That didn’t give her any privilege in getting our daughter accepted, but she did know how to navigate the system. A big part of her job was in helping other parents get their special needs kids accepted into the program.
The system is far from perfect & there were still challenges to overcome at times, BUT it was nowhere near the constant struggle described in Ian’s story. We were never called into the school as a result of a behavior issue with our daughter (& at times there were issues). Of course I’m not an education professional & don’t know any details about Ian’s situation, but I wonder if such a program would be a better option for a child like Ian, rather than an ongoing battle with Success Academy just to prove a point. From what I know of Success Academy, it’s not worth the effort.