I was wondering about what high schools do now to punish misbehavior. Do they still put students on detention? I assume they will suspend you if the behavior is too out of line, but for, say, a first offense for something relatively minor.
If detention isn’t used, what is?
Where I coach, they still use detention. Both after school or Saturday morning as escalation.
As of last year, yes they do. Both after school and Saturday morning.
I don’t know about this year as the kid graduated. But I’m guessing yes.
Saturday morning? That’s news to me. Where do you people live?
I’m guessing that you’re not from the land of cowboys, guns— and vast suburban tracts of housing where children are taken to and from school by special yellow buses.
In England and Europe, I assume that many children walk to school, or take regular public transportation, so that a child could report to school on a Saturday.
In most parts of America, it is physically impossible for a kid to get to school on a Saturday (unless the parents drive him.)
I went to school in the land of vast suburban housing tracts, and my high and middle schools both had after school and Saturday detention. How you got there (or how you got home from detention after school) was your problem to work out, not the school’s.
ETA: I just checked the handbook online, and they’ve now moved “Saturday School” to Fridays after school, from 3:00 to 7:00. Except it’s still called Saturday School in most places in the handbook. And they still have regular detention (one hour) too.
All the schools I have worked in to date have had school buses (although the high school I went to did not), as most town high schools have a largish catchment area and many pupils are not within walking distance even though plenty of them may be.
My school in the 1970s did indeed have Saturday detentions, of which I had several, which were a real nuisance to get to for me from out of town even though there was technically a public bus service.
So, what happens when a kid doesn’t show for a Saturday detention?
Tripler
Me? Nooooooo. I never got caught.
I don’t know about today, but when we had Saturday detentions, the difficulty getting there was kind of the point. It meant you had to get a ride from a parent there, and they had to come pick you up to bring you back home in the evening*, and that meant your parent had to know that you “got a Saturday” and that meant (the school officials hoped) that the parent thus inconvenienced would apply some disciplinary pressure at home, as well as at school.
And if you didn’t show up for a Saturday, you got an in-school suspension one day the following week instead. In-school meant you sat in a classroom with a disgruntled teacher who didn’t want to be there any more than you, and you sat there. No doing homework, no talking, no reading, no nothing. It was an unexcused absence in your other classes, so if you had any tests or work due, it was a Zero (Failure) figured into your grade.
*Seriously, haven’t you seen The Breakfast Club?
Denver. Cowboys, check. Guns, check. Vast expanses of suburbs, check.
However, I am in the city. There were students carried to school by yellow buses but my sons were never among them because they kept moving the boundaries (for example, my next-door neighbors’ girls went to the same middle school and they got the bus, but by the time my kid went there he lived “too close.” Two and a quarter miles. (Another quarter-mile would have done it.)
The Saturday detention was for those who missed two after-school detentions or who had done something especially terrible. Kid had to get there on his own as he did every other day, which meant that if he could talk a parent into driving him that worked, if not, he could bicycle or take the bus.
During the in-school suspension they actually let them catch up on their homework and if there was a test in a class they were missing, they let them take it, either then or later. My kid’s rap sheet included an incredible number of ditches, and when it seemed to turn out that he preferred in-school suspension they made him come in on Saturdays until he got straightened out.
That’s a seriously up-fucked discipline strategy. Education am important! The whole idea of sending kids to school is to get them an education. Everybody should be in favor of kids getting an education.
If kids need to be disciplined, do it in a way that doesn’t up-fuck their education. Make them stay late and do a book report. Send them to bed without dinner. If they can’t get home from detention, make them sleep out on the playground in the rain or snow. Whip them into a bloody pulp if that what it takes! (Okay, some of this may be a little exaggerated.)
But don’t fuck with their education. Let them read/study and do homework in detention. Better still, require it! Let them stop by their class after school to get their assignments. Disciplining school children by obstructing their education is vile and evil, and profoundly hypocritical.
ETA:
Now, that’s more like it.