TRAC - a possible solution?

TRAC – a possible solution for Herald County

Given Herald County School System’s support and enthusiasm for punishment, Zero Tolerance policies and “getting the bad kids out of the classroom,” there is little hope, in the short run, of decreasing the number of children in Herald County defined as needing Alternative Education. However given not only this reality, but also guided by my experience at Prospect School and informed by formal studies on Alternative Schools, I believe there is a better answer for the at-risk Herald County school children.

The response of Herald County to highly disruptive children typically falls into three categories: keep the child in his or her classroom, keep suspending (or expel) the child or send the child to a privately run Alternative School. None of these are good answers. TRAC (Temporary Removal from Assigned Classes) offers a better solution, for the children, their families and the schools.

TRAC differs in three key elements from the typical approaches for dealing with disruptive children. Most importantly, children would remain on their school campus and continue to be enrolled in the public school system. This will allow them to receive the full complement of services the public school provides as well as preventing them from becoming invisible in a parallel system where school laws and regulations often do not apply. The other differences are the extended day schedule and the using a diverse team to develop and modify a prescriptive plan tailored to each child’s unique needs and situation.

TRAC Scheduling
TRAC scheduling and staffing would differ from the mainstream school program. The extended day would permit the child to receive the counseling and additional tutoring she or he needs, plus keeps the child “off the streets” during the prime time for juvenile crime, 3:00 p.m. -7:00 p.m. With few exceptions, children who have been disruptive in school are behind academically. While experts argue whether poor academic performance is a cause or effect of highly disruptive students, the additional schooling will serve to improve academic performance. These double long school days could also be viewed as a punishment, molifying the pro-punishment advocates and the extended days may serve as a deterrent (assuming children of this age think about consequences before they act, an uncertain proposition at best). The staffing for this extended day should include two TRAC teachers with overlapping shifts at mid-day for example, one teacher might arrive at 7:00 am and work until 2:00 while the second teacher would arrive at noon and work until 7:00 pm. The teachers should be certified public school teachers employed by the child’s school providing individualized or small group instruction in all subjects using the same texts and curriculum used by the child’s regular teachers.

TRAC Classrooms
Each portable classroom should be designed to accommodate ten to twelve TRAC students at a time. When there are fewer children, the TRAC staff can spend some of their days working with those difficult children identified by the principal as heading down the path to removal from assigned classes (pre-TRAC). If the numbers on any given campus increase, more staff and portables need to be made available. Since it is difficult to predict with certainty the number of children on any given campus who will require TRAC during the school year, it could be necessary to shift these human and physical resources from one campus to another. Children however, should not be transferred. The classrooms wiould thus be staffed with three adults, the two teachers with overlapping shifts and a counselor. The TRAC counselor would be present in the portable to provide structured, scheduled counseling, as well as counseling on an as-needed basis (on everything from anger control to peer relations) and to accompany the child to class when she or he first returns.

TRAC Team
The first phase for TRAC, would be a meeting, organized by the Director of Alternative Education, with all the vital players:
• the child
• the child’s parents or guardian
• DCF caseworker
• the child’s minister
• the school principal
• the child’s teachers
• the school counselor
• the school resource officer
• the child’s bus driver
• representatives from relevant social agencies – drug rehab, sexual abstinence, anger control
• representatives from the child’s outside activities both current and potential, such a football coach, gymnastics instructor, piano teacher etcetera.
• If the child has a probation officer, she or he should attend. The director of alternative education should be the organizer for this meeting.
• the TRAC teachers and counselor

Why would these people be considered necessary at this TRAC meeting? The child and his/her parents or guardians must be present. This seems so obvious, but all too often decisions are made about students in their absence. It is vital for parents to be present and flexibility should be shown in scheduling the meeting and in helping with transportation. If necessary, pressure can and should be brought to bear to get parents to attend, and this is one role the DCF representative should play.

It should become regular practice to open a DCF case every time a child is referred to TRAC (assuming the child doesn’t already have a DCF caseworker). Is neglectful or abusive parenting what lies behind the troubling behaviors? Any referral to remove a child from the educational mainstream, implies the principal and parent were unable to form a team to help the child.

DCF should use the carrot/stick approach. Parents need to fear termination of parental rights but also need to be made aware of affordable treatment options and support services to help them cope with their out-of-control child. The threat of termination of parental rights may help inspire reluctant parents to attend the conference. DCF cannot be present in name only. This ailing agency needs to locate, develop and incent more and better foster homes including therapeutic foster homes to provide viable options for these highly disruptive children found living in neglectful or abusive situations. If DCF decides to place the child in a relative’s care, more frequent and substantial monitoring and support than currently exists, needs to be provided. Moreover, DCF needs to make referrals to support current family structures which although dysfunctional, don’t require removing the child from the home.

A minister or other religious leader should be present. At first blush this may sound like a strange request that possibly blurs the lines between church and state. However religion plays a large role in American life. This is especially true in the culture of the south, including Florida and very much so in Herald County. Religious institutions whether churches, temples or mosques, serve an important function in creating communities and like a village, can help raise a child.

If the child’s family belongs to a religious institution, even if they are not regular attendees, their religious leader should be present at the conference. This religious leader would attend to be made aware of the problem, to become part of the solution and to encourage and if necessary pressure the child to become involved in youth group and other religious sponsored activities which promote the values seemingly missing based on the child’s misbehavior. In the event the child does not identify with a religion, a religious leader could still be present. In Herald County there is a movement called: One church, One child. The idea is that every church should “adopt” a troubled child and his/her family regardless of their religious beliefs, and mentor and assist the child with all the resources the church can bring to the table.

The school principal and all the child’s teachers should to be present. The presence of parents and teachers will strengthen the home / school connection showing the child a united front and helping the child understand that these parties will continue to communicate in the future. Moreover by having all the teachers present there can be no chance for a miscommunication, no teacher will be left in the dark. In most cases the classroom teacher was, intentionally or unintentionally, shown disrespect by the child. Thus it is the teacher who can best deliver the message telling the child she or he must not only by attend all mandatory counseling sessions, required meetings and activities, but more importantly, the child must refrain from engaging in inappropriate behavior in the classroom. The teachers and principal are best suited for clarifying the school rules and expectations and helping the child understand that at least in the short term, he or she is now viewed as untrustworthy.

The school counselor, SRO (school resource officer, aka Deputy) and a bus driver should be present at the conference. Part of the treatment plan for the child would involve regular, frequent counseling sessions. Initially these should be daily tapering off to no fewer than once a week until all parties are convinced the child can be released from the contract. The SRO assigned to the school, should be present both to become aware of the status of this student and for clear communication. The presence of the deputy would help the child realize that she or he has become “one of the usual suspects” and will need to avoid any perception of and association with wrong doing. The bus driver is present because with few exceptions, these highly disruptive children should not be permitted on their regular school bus. However the public schools should still provide transportation via a separate bus. It will not be necessary to hire a new driver or purchase another bus due to the requirement that the TRAC schedule be for an extended day program.

Representatives from social service agencies outside the school should be present. If the child’s misbehavior involved sex, the volunteers from a sex education program should not only be present but the child should be mandated to complete their program. Similarly if the offense involved drugs, the child should be required to complete an anti-drug program with random drug testing. With few exceptions, all of these troubled children will require anger control classes. Children should receive anger control training at school but also outside of school along with other family members. The family life of most of these troubled children is stressful and too often their families respond to stress with anger. We have neither the resources nor the ability to provide these families with cars that don’t break down, well paying jobs with reasonable bosses, good health and satisfying relationships with significant others. But we can teach parents and children how to respond to the stress caused by the lack of these essentials with something other than anger. Thus a counselor from a local anger control program should be present. If the child is academically deficient, as are most children currently referred to alternative schools, then a tutor or representative from a tutoring program should be present with the stipulation that the contract calls for daily after school tutoring. These social service interventions ideally would take place on the school campus before or after regular school hours. If that is not feasible, transportation should be arranged so the child’s success isn’t dependent on a parent who can’t or won’t comply.

The conference and subsequent contract should not be exclusively punitive. The child’s strengths should be noted – artistic abilities, musical talents, athletic prowess. If the child isn’t already involved in sports, activities or classes to exploit these strengths, arrangements should be made to include these but again a timeline needs to be devised. “We’ve signed you up for a ten month gymnastic course at a private gym. Classes are three times a week. But they won’t begin until you meet all the criteria of this contract for two months and since the contract runs for twelve months, if you start gymnastics and then fail to comply with the contract, gymnastics classes will be put on hold.”

All team members should anticipate and in fact expect the child to progress with two steps forward, one step back. Children will “fall off the wagon,” there will be recidivism. While these slips are depressing and disheartening to all involved, they must not cause the key players to view the child as a failure or the situation as hopeless. A meeting should be held to analyze the situation and determine what went well and what went wrong and why, then a new timetable devised and the program started anew.

After the initial meeting, the second and most difficult phase of TRAC involves trust. The child should be made to understand that while all academic expectations and materials including lessons, textbooks, assignments and homework will remain the same, some things will change. The child would now be required always be within arm’s length of a teacher or counselor. This identifies the child as a risk, as a person in need of extra supervision and requiring accommodations such as an assigned seat near the teacher and no privileges such as delivering messages to the office. The clear message should be that this child cannot be trusted. The stigmatizing effect would help satisfy those who cry for punishment while simultaneously serving a safety and security purpose. The written contract would specify how much time must elapse and what behaviors must be demonstrated for the child to be worthy of trust and thus released from arm’s length status.

The stigmatizing and ostracizing of the child may be anathema from a psychological perspective, but it is important to remember the emotions regarding these very troubled and troublesome children: school administrators and the school board want them out of their schools, parents don’t want these “bad” children near their offspring and everyone is looking for sanctions and punishments. However, revoking all privileges and putting a child on arm’s length status are not merely a sop to placate the angry mob, these children really do jeopardize safety and security and in order to achieve rapid reintegration into their regular classrooms, they need to be easily and obviously identified. Individual schools could design rules and privileges regarding the students who must be within arms length of an adult at all times, they may get served last at lunch and not be permitted to use the bathroom without an escort. It is important to make the rules for getting off arm’s length status clear and not too difficult to achieve. The objective is for the child to want to be trusted and to slowly move the child toward regaining trust. The goal is to move rapidly to a time when we can start adding positive activities that speak to a child’s strengths.

Once the child is off “arm’s length status”, the third phase of TRAC begins. During the initial meeting, the child’s interests and strengths were identified. Now is the time to get the child involved in activities that capitalize on those interests and abilities (artistic, musical and athletic). If the child isn’t already involved in sports, activities or classes to exploit these strengths, then this is the time to make it happen.

TRAC Completion
The final phase of TRAC is reintegration. The return to regular classes should be done very slowly and with much discussion and support. At the team conference a determination should be made as to in which class the child had the fewest problems and devise a timeline listing that class as the first for reintegration. Prior to returning, a meeting should take place with that teacher, the TRAC teachers, counselor and the student to be sure expectations are clear. Just before class, the counselor would remind the student of the goals and accompanies the child to class. If the child successfully attends class, the counselor would continue to attend but slowly taper off, remaining in the classroom for fewer and fewer minutes until the child is attending on his or her own but still working on the feedback loop to insure frequent and clear communication regarding the child’s return to that class. After a time a second class is added using the same procedure. Careful monitoring and immediate feedback is necessary to catch small problems before they escalate. Once the child is attending mainstream classes full-time, support systems should remain to prevent recidivism. This is a child at-risk and as long as the child is at this school, she or he will need a school-centered safety net.

Not just a Florida Problem

School Board members, politicians and educators, in Herald County and across the United States, proudly tout their Zero Tolerance policies. Zero Tolerance continues to help fuel the national growth in suspensions and expulsions. Enacted in response to several well-publicized school shootings, Zero Tolerance became the law of the land in 1994 when President Bill Clinton signed the Gun-Free Schools Act (GFSA). By then, New York, California and Kentucky already had Zero Tolerance laws on the books mandating expulsion for gang violence, fighting and drugs.

While GFSA required expulsion of students who brought a weapon to school, educators pushed for, and legislators and school boards eagerly supported, expanding the definition of “weapon” to include not only firearms, but also knives, illegal drugs, water pistols, prescription and over-the-counter medication. But Zero Tolerance isn’t limited to “weapons,” (no matter how broadly defined) the Zero Tolerance list now includes expulsion for alcohol, fighting, swearing, disrupting class, disobedience, truancy and more than a dozen other forms of misbehavior.

In 2005, media attention on arrests of children in Florida and Nevada turned up the heat on Zero Tolerance policies. Eyebrows were raised when two elementary school children were arrested in Ocala, Florida, for drawing threatening stick figures in class, a 6-year-old in Florida's Brevard County was handcuffed and removed from school for hitting his teacher and a police officer with a book and in Nevada, Clark County School District officials tried to expel a student who drew a comic strip depicting the death of his teacher.

Ruth Zweifler, executive director of Michigan's Student Advocacy Center (SAC), doesn't mince words. "Zero tolerance," she says, "has become a full-blown war on children. Instead of being targeted for reform, students are being targeted for expulsion. School districts have a duty to find children who have special problems and address their needs before it's too late. Instead, they're engaged in a 'child hunt.'"


"Clearly I think there are incidents that are so excessive that the facts show that this (Zero Tolerance) is a mindless policy in most places," said Mark Soler, president of the Youth Law Center, a Washington, D.C.-based law firm that works on child-welfare and juvenile justice system issues.

But Zero Tolerance is more than “mindless.” In school districts across the United States, Zero Tolerance has been shown to primarily victimize poor, black children.
“In Texas, zero-tolerance policies have resulted in a disproportionate number of low-income, disabled and minority students being sent to alternative disciplinary schools, most of which have few books or computers and substandard teachers . . .. What makes me really concerned is that the majority of kids sent to disciplinary schools are poor kids, almost all black and brown children," - Texas state Rep. Dora Olivo.

Beverly Cross, an urban education specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who contributed to a 2001 study of racial profiling and punishment in U.S. public schools published by the Applied Research Center's ERASE Initiative, found Zero Tolerance has created many rule-bound "maximum security schools" where students of color are suspended and expelled at increasing rates, often for nonviolent and subjectively defined offenses. "Racism rests just beneath the surface of zero-tolerance decisions."

In their 2001 report Zero Tolerance: Unfair, with Little Recourse, Dan Losen and Johanna Wald of Harvard University's Civil Rights Project and Judith Browne, senior attorney at the Advancement Project, report that although black students make up only 17 percent of all U.S. students, they account for 33 percent of all out-of-school suspensions and 31 percent of all expulsions. By contrast, 63 percent of all students are white, but they account for only 50 percent of out-of-school suspensions. What's more, the Civil Rights Project reports, students of color are more likely than white students to be suspended or expelled for willful acts, often labeled as disobedience, disruption, or disrespect for authority.
National trends show a significant increase in the number of students who are expelled and suspended each year as well as an increase in the amount of time these students are excluded from school. While some of these children are victims of misapplied Zero Tolerance policies, many are very troubled and highly disruptive students and their numbers are challenging school boards and legislators across the United States.

Massachusetts: "It's become acceptable to push students out of the classroom rather than addressing the underlying issue."
Emily Anthes Boston Globe “Academic discipline actions on rise” 4/6/2004

Texas: “The law states that every student in an alternative learning center (ALC) is required to receive a comparable education to that of regular schools. But after hearing the complaints of parents who had children in one of the ALC schools in my district, I found otherwise I visited the [ALC] school, and the school still had no textbooks [and] there was a lack of adequate materials for the teachers. Clearly, and not through the fault of the teachers, this was a clear-cut picture of ‘warehousing.’ It is very irresponsible to allow such a situation to exist and totally disregards the best interest of the children.” Dora Olivo, Texas State Representative, District 27
North Carolina: “Regular schools reduce their efforts to address discipline and behavior problems by changing the school culture, finding it easier simply to exclude “problem” students. Alternative schools become a dumping ground for unwanted students. A disproportionate number of African American students are placed in alternative schools, resulting in racial resegregation of public schools. Few students sent to alternative schools ever return to their regular schools, and their likelihood of dropping out may even increase. Ineffective alternative schools consume resources that would have been better spent to improve regular schools.”

Ohio: Steve Rosenthal, the director of information and resources at the Alternative Education Resource Organization, expressed concern that alternative education in the Cleveland Schools could become a warehouse for kids who did not fit well at traditional schools. “A lot of (alternative) schools are just a dumping ground for kids who are not fitting in, administrators want to get them out of the population and don’t do much for the kids after removing them from traditional school.”

Arkansas: When the Arkansas Interim Committee on Education asked educators for input on how to cope with violent students, many teachers loudly demanded more Alternative Schools so they can “get these bad children out of the classroom” while others, more familiar with Alternative Schools objected saying these are nothing more than “discipline dumps.”

In May 1999, 47 states had laws permitting or mandating Alternative Schools, by 2004 virtually every state offered Alternative Schooling for disruptive students. Although educators may use the term “Alternative School,” meanings differ dramatically between states, and even between school districts within each state.



Alternative School can mean:
• a shortened school day or a later school start time
• classes on Saturdays
• a classroom within the school for part or all of the day
• a school within a school program
• a work-study program
• home instruction
• a separate school run by the public school
• a boarding school
• an innovative school not primarily discipline oriented
• a separate school run by a private non-profit or for profit company

There is more agreement about what makes a successful Alternative School. Although due to financial and political considerations, the practice rarely mirrors the research. Studies point to a dozen characteristics necessary for a successful Alternative School.

1. School Size: The school should have a teacher/student ratio of no more than 1:10 and the student population should not exceed 250 students.
2. Mission and Purpose: The school should have a well-defined mission and purpose along with a clearly articulated discipline code.
3. Faculty: The school must recruit, train and retain qualified and highly trained staff with special expertise in alternative education. The faculty needs to be caring, competent and committed to the philosophy of alternative schooling. They must volunteer, not get assigned, to teach in the Alternative School. Faculty must receive continual staff development. One of the most critical factors in the success of an alternative school is the personal relationship that exists between the students and their teachers.
4. Safety and Security: The school must promote a sense of belonging. Students should feel cared for, respected and safe (academically, physically, emotionally and socially).
5. Counseling: Students need regular and frequent access to effective social services and counseling. The school must provide and integrate into the school program, community mental health, health and social services with other collaborating agencies in the community.
6. Parental Involvement: To the maximum extent possible, parents need to be actively engaged in the Alternative School.
7. The School Building: The Alternative School should be a modern, welcoming physical environment well stocked with the books, furniture and technology equivalent to the mainstream school.
8. Voluntary Participation: Students must not feel they have been sentenced to the Alternative School. Attending the school should be viewed by students, parents, faculty and the community as a privilege rather than a punishment.
9. Curriculum: The curriculum should mirror the mainstream school but with a student-centered approach allowing for student input and tailored to diverse learning styles. Clear, well-defined learning objectives are mandatory. The faculty must maintain high expectations for student achievement, promoting high standards, student accountability and a variety of assessment tools for measuring student progress.
10. School to School Relationship: Frequent, regular communication between the mainstream (sending) school and the Alternative School is required along with strong support from the school board and school district. The Alternative School must be a part of, and have a close working relationship with, all parts of the school system.
11. Community: Efforts must be made to reach out to, gain the support of and involve the local community in the Alternative School.
12. Hope: The single most critical factor in the success of the Alternative School is the total commitment to have every student be a success. A clearly defined plan for each student’s future, including when appropriate, the criteria to reenter the mainstream school is the roadmap to hope