EI 46.8 SCHOOL OFFICE EMPLOYEES’ RESPONSIBILITIES FOR DISRUPTIVE STUDENTS

WHEREAS, the practice in many schools when faced with an unruly student is to send that student to the principal’s office. The result might be a call to the student's parents or detention time(but this almost always occurs after the student has spent time waiting in the office. Often the principal's secretary or another secretarial/clerical staff member becomes responsible for the student and for monitoring the student's behavior while he or she is in the office. Under normal circumstances, this practice makes sense, as the staff in the central office may be the only adults available to assist with this short-term supervision of disruptive students, but office employees have seen a growing abuse of the practice, with the central office becoming the daylong time-out room for one or more students; and

WHEREAS, this extended responsibility leaves the office staff member in an uncertain position, confronted with a series of challenges:

• no clear district policy delineating who is ultimately responsible for the students sent to the office;

• lack of authority in disciplining a student;

• insufficient training in proper discipline procedures;

• time taken away from regular assignments; and

WHEREAS, school office employees agree wholeheartedly with the AFT’s national campaign, Lessons for Life: Responsibility, Respect, Results, which calls for establishing alternative educational placements or settings for chronically disruptive students and are heartened by efforts to establish stronger discipline policies at the school district level that clearly delineate punishments for specific misdeeds:

RESOLVED, that the AFT continue to encourage all local affiliates to establish discipline policies that ensure all school district personnel the same rights to training and enforcement of school discipline codes; and

RESOLVED, that office employees not be expected to supervise, for extended periods of time, disruptive students who have been removed from classrooms.

(Executive Council 1996)