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...