The Saugus Union School District’s Behavior Definition Sub-Committee has concluded its mission to define what student behaviors need intervention and who, between administrators and classroom staff, should manage it.
Student Support Services Director Tonya Nowakowski presented at the district’s regular board meeting Wednesday on the subcommittee’s work over its past three meetings.
“(The result is) that alignment and agreement that these diverse roles and these diverse perspectives came together and all said, ‘This is what we believe is appropriate for students in Saugus, as far as what is expected for them,’” Nowakowski said.
That committee – a 10-member group that includes a cross section of district employees, including teachers, classified employees, an administrator and a social worker – had its final meeting on Jan. 28.
A district-wide presentation was held on March 4 to present the subcommittee’s behavior definitions and explain the rationale behind them. The presentation was also recorded for future hires, Nowakowski said.
The subcommittee listed behavior that’s expected to be managed by classroom staff as defiance, disruption, rude or inappropriate language or gestures, unintentional physical contact, property misuse, certain kinds of technology violations or cheating.
Behavior that should be deferred to administrators to handle includes threat of physical injury, intentional physical aggression, property damage, theft, a pattern of abusive language or profanity, certain kinds of technology violations, elopement (leaving campus), plagiarism, use of hate speech, bully cyberbullying, harassment, and terrorist threats if the student is in grades four through six.
Nowakowski said that those definitions would be used to help log student behavior in the Panorama software used by the district.
Subcommittees geared more toward teaching students social-emotional skills, including the Tools and Interventions and Social-Emotional Sub-Committees, will also be meeting in the coming months.
With the Behavior Sub-Committee’s definitions intended to give district employees a basis for more accurate reporting and data analysis, the next subcommittee to convene, the Consequences Sub-Committee, is scheduled to begin refining the district’s matrix of potential consequences for those behaviors on Friday.
Nowakowski mentioned other actions the district was taking to help teachers manage student behavior, including verbal de-escalation training for recommended staff and sending a 20-plus group of educators to Capturing Kids’ Hearts Training this summer.
“We had a collective conversation … around what are the areas that every site should have expectations for, because not every site has an edible garden, so like Cedarcreek (Elementary) probably needs expectations for there, but the other sites don’t,” Nowakowski said. “What are the must-do’s as far as having expectations, and then the draft behavior handbook will include the behavior definitions, reporting processes, tools that the subcommittee agrees on, and then also those consequences to support what sites are already doing.”
Those site expectations prompted follow-up questions from board member Anna Griese, who questioned why different sites should have different consequences for behavior, if that was what was being proposed.
That kicked off a back-and-forth about how the Consequences Sub-Committee intended to standardize student behavior consequences. While all agreed the subcommittee should be allowing nuance for primary versus secondary students, trustees and Nowakowski spent some time picking apart the strictness of the hypothetical consequences roll-out.
“There’s going to be times when everybody should do exactly the same thing, then there’s going to be times when the teacher is going to know how to handle it, and they’re going to know what’s going to affect that child the most,” said board clerk Katherine Cooper.
Griese broadly disagreed, saying factors leading to a child biting, for example, were irrelevant.
“Because Johnny had a great day Monday, but a really poor day Tuesday, because he didn’t have breakfast, so he decided to bite. And then Eric, sorry for the boys, right? Same thing, a bite is still a bite,” Griese said. “It’s a little bit of no tolerance, right?”
Nowakowski eventually added that while the Consequences Sub-Committee would be standardizing consequences for the district, other considerations would be made to make sure the district wasn’t disproportionately punishing certain students.
“It’ll be a robust conversation with the consequences subgroup, because I think also, as we look at disproportionality in discipline with students of color and students with disabilities, historically and continuing, they are over-represented in discipline,” Nowakowski said. “And so it’s not necessarily this behavior equals this, but I think it’s a conversation that the consequences group is going to figure out what is the nuance for students, regardless of ability, disability, ethnicity, race, language, grade, etc.”
