About Face flips behavior at Fox Chapel

The disciplinary program, pushing students to own up to what they did wrong, has decreased problems at the overcrowded middle school.

By ABHI RAGHUNATHAN
Published November 29, 2004

SPRING HILL - It didn't take long for administrators at the already crowded Fox Chapel Middle School to feel the presence of dozens of new students who poured in last year.

During lunch hours, the cafeteria was packed. The hallways were often clogged before the influx. Now they hosted frequent scuffles and fights.

As more students racked up disciplinary problems, in-school suspension became a choice destination for troubled kids looking to hang out with their equally troubled friends.

Some teachers said they began feeling more like cops than educators. The three administrators who handle most disciplinary incidents each had to deal with between 20 and 30 a day, school officials said.

"When you put a lot of kids in a tight environment, you get more discipline-related issues," principal David Schoelles said.

A group of school officials set up a task force to come up with ways to reduce the simmering chaos. First, they sent out surveys to students and parents. Then they examined the results to see how they could establish order in an increasingly crowded school. They came up with a program called About Face, which took effect this school year.

The superintendent and School Board recently recognized About Face's effectiveness. As schools across the district become increasingly crowded, they may look to Fox Chapel's approach for solutions.

They won't find traditional answers because Fox Chapel chucked many old-fashioned disciplinary practices. Instead of doling out stringent punishments, Fox Chapel stresses individual responsibility. Already, the number of discipline referrals each administrator handles has dropped to three or four a day.

About 1,290 students enrolled for the 2003-04 school year, Schoelles said, 100 more than the year before. They were learning on a campus originally built as an elementary school.

In the 1980s, Fox Chapel served as West Hernando Middle School. For part of the 1990s, it served as the ninth-grade annex for Springstead High School. It was only in 1997 that it became Fox Chapel Middle.

Not surprisingly, the school strained to handle the influx. Many of the disciplinary problems seemed to bubble up from crowding issues.

When a fight broke out in the hallway, teachers couldn't push through a crowd of students to break it up. In the narrow hallways, students would push and shove one another, sometimes slamming into lockers.

In dealing with the rising problems, "we had one guiding philosophy - student ownership," said Kimberly Ruoff, a Fox Chapel teacher who headed the About Face committee.

About Face has nine phases that begin with talking to a teacher and end with a student's conduct falling under administrator providence. The penalties veer away from traditional punishments. Instead, the program calls for pushing students to understand what they were doing as they rack up discipline problems.

For example, instead of having administrators call parents to talk about a conduct problem, students now make those calls. Students who are punished by having to eat lunch alone must copy down disciplinary rules as they sit in solitude.

Fox Chapel also adopted other changes to ease crowding. New rules require students to head directly from their bus to class. The school issued two sets of textbooks to students (one for school, the other for home) and removed lockers to help move crowds through the halls. Teachers stand at their doors to keep watch.

Other traditional punishments, such as in-school suspension, have been rethought. Ruoff said the About Face committee didn't want to keep students from their classes. The strictest punishment in the program requires students to attend "extended school" after classes several hours every week for six weeks to create a self-discipline plan.

"The students would meet in in-school, in out-of-school suspension, and in the STAR Center," said Ruoff of previous punishments. "It wasn't effective at all for us."

The new methods have been more effective. Even on a "bad day," administrators handle six to eight disciplinary problems, a huge reduction from the old numbers. Only a few students have reached the "extended school" stage and failed to improve.

Jim Knight, the district's director of student services, said Fox Chapel had referred three more students for expulsion and four more to the STAR Center than West Hernando Middle, which has a similar population, before About Face. So far this year, Knight said, Fox Chapel's referals for stringent penalties have gone down to a level comparable with West Hernando's.

"The atmosphere's changing," said Andrea Kelly, a social studies teacher at Fox Chapel who also helped with the program. "That was the goal."

Abhi Raghunathan can be reached at 352 848-1431 or araghunathan@sptimes.com

[Last modified November 29, 2004, 00:39:13]