My Journey to Educational Administration

 A topic that will not be going away anytime soon is the effect that the COVID shut down has had on education. Here in California, many students were out of school for almost a full two years, and the impact that this had on their education varied depending on a number of factors: location, socio-economic status, parent involvement, access to wifi, number of students in the household, etc.  A number of my own students admitted that they would log into their classes and then walk away from the computer, fall asleep, or just not pay attention. Our district did not require the students to turn on their cameras during distance learning. This was partly due to the socioeconomic status of many of our students; some of them were doing distance learning in bathrooms or closets.  Because of the lack of consistency of education, many of the students are behind, and some of them were already behind before the pandemic.  Even beyond the initial impact of the closure that occured...

It seems like when we suspend students it does not have the intended outcome: reforming the behavior. Students look at it like a vacation from school rather than a punitive consequence. The same students are often the ones getting in trouble, and often for the same issue over and over again. In looking at options other than suspension, the Department of Education website offers a multitude of options for programs to get help for and educate students. They encourage schools to put in multi-tiered support systems and offer suspension as a last resort.  I have seen amazing programs on my campus, and I hope that the students who need these programs are the ones that are listening, and yet the drugs, the fights, the suspension-able offenses are still happening everyday.  At a previous school I worked at, a student got in a fight or got caught with drugs and they were sent to an alternative learning center for 30 days. They did their school work while they were there. We seemed to h...

 There seems to be a discrepancy in the world of English language learners. The first being the survey that puts them into English language courses to begin with, and the second being the requirements to exit them from the courses. An article by Salerno and Andrei (2021) discusses the varying Home Language Surveys (HLS) used by the 50 states in determining which children get tested for English language services. Their student looks at the different questions and the different requirements across the nation and determine that based on the requirements from the USDOE that various states use the requirements very differently. As part of their study they even filled out and submitted the form for different case studies to various states and the results varied. Part of the problem is the way the questions are written. Their can be misinterpretation based on the wording of the questions, as well as, a lack of a full picture of the language use of the child both positively and negatively....

Since returning from COVID there has been an increase in fights. At first, we placed the blame on the fact that these students had not been socialized in a long time, and many schools on the west coast, in fact 34% according to the 2022 School Pulse Panel on student behavior, showed an uptick in physical attacks or fights between students in the year following the pandemic. However, it seemed to get a little better, but it was more like the calm before the storm. There were still fights on campus, but not the everyday fights we had seen when we first returned, and those fights had seemed to be mostly from our middle school population.  Right now, we are seeing another surge in fighting. This time they seem to have a racial component to them. I have only been at our school for five year, and I admit I am still learning about our population. What I mean by this is that I was unaware of the prevalence of our gang population. It is still a relatively small number, but it is significant...

What can be done to help students come to school on time?  At our school, the number of students that are late to class throughout the day is a problem.  It is greater during the first periods of the day, but it is is a problem throughout the day.  One of the things that has been tried in the past is sending the students to "tardy sweep," but all that did was keep students out of class, and they would purposely show up late, so they didn't have to go to class.  Then they realized we would let them in class no matter what time they showed up, so there needed to be something done. Now if they are more than 30 minutes late, they are sent to "tardy sweep," but they are to do work when they arrive.  Last week at my school, our tardy policy was outlined in a clear delineated process. This is in an attempt to curb the rampant tardiness of many of our students. Some of this habitual tardiness is the students' responsibility and some of it is because of the parents. ...

Over the course of my twenty-two years of teaching, the rules governing Halloween have changed with the times. When I first started teaching, rules regarding costumes seemed to be more lax. The conversations about masks had just begun, and, like the dress code, the costumes have become more restricted as needed. There didn't seem to be rules about candy and parties at all.  In my current district, the rules regarding costumes are that they cannot have masks. We have to remind the students that this is not just to be mean, but it is for their safety as we need to be able to see faces at all times to ensure that no one is on campus who does not belong there. The costumes have to be within the rules of our dress code, and they have to be appropriate: no cross-dressing, no plastic weapons, etc.  As for candy and parties, we are reminded as teachers to be cognizant of allergies. The school is not allowed to provide non-healthy options, but the students often share with each other. ...