'Reset Room' counters suspensions, school-to-prison pipeline

The worst thing a school can do for a child’s future is to kick him or her out of class, or school.

The school-to-prison pipeline is real.

When a school environment rejects a child, that child can easily in turn reject the environment. That could lead to him or her dropping out.

Suspension doubles a student’s chance of dropping out, from 16 to 32 percent, according to a study from the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University. Even a single suspension during a student’s freshman year raises the chance of her dropping out, the same study found.

Children dropping out has devastating effects on the lives of themselves, their families, their communities and the overall economy. The evidence strongly suggests that many young adults trained to do nothing in society, do crime.

In federal and state prisons, nearly 7 in 10 prisoners are dropouts, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. The figures for African-American boys are even more stark; there is a 70 percent chance a black male dropout will wind up in jail by his mid-30s, according to a study by the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Group.

As one Illinois public safety official put it plainly: “Dropping out of high school was an apprenticeship for prison.”

That is why I like the idea of a “reset room,” an alternative to in-school and out-of-school suspension that is currently operating at a local middle school, Max Abbott. I checked out how the program works at the school and could not stop thinking how it could help students throughout Cumberland County Schools and throughout the country.

I also could not stop thinking how it could specifically help African-American students, who are disproportionately impacted by suspensions and other forms of extreme discipline.

Perhaps by pure coincidence, the three students available to talk about the Reset Room while I was there were all African-American, two boys and a girl.

“It’s a place where you can calm down,” one of the boys told me. “Sometimes I just like put my head down and get myself together.”

Max Abbott’s Reset Room doubles as the office for the school social worker, Teri Medina. As the name of the room implies, it is a place to go for students who are feeling wound up, angry or stressed out. It is a reset for the students but also for their teachers. When a teacher senses a child is feeling overwhelmed or about to blow up, she can issue him a pass to the Reset Room. A student can also ask for a pass. This can head off an uglier situation that would send the student instead to the office of Principal Carla Crenshaw.

All the Reset Room items were donated or things the school already had on hand. Crenshaw says the room has reduced in-school and out-of-school suspensions at Abbott. It has reduced recommendations for sending a student to an alternative school from 3 to 0, compared to the same time last year.

Medina says the room is not only to head off behavioral problems, but is used even by high-performing children who may be stressing out over an exam. Students in the Reset Room can use the 10 to 15 minutes of break time to do one of a variety of activities from writing or drawing to jump rope, or they can just chill in a bean bag with their thoughts. Medina has posted in the room tips on meditation and yoga.

Medina lets them know she is available to talk and most of them take her up on that.

“While they’re in there, they’re learning coping skills,” she says.

Black students hit harder

The idea of a reset between student and teacher is critically important to black youth, who statistics show have a much slimmer margin of error when it comes to being punished.

Last spring, the federal Civil Rights Data Collection showed that black students were much more likely to be suspended, expelled or arrested at school than their white counterparts. Black students were four times more likely to be suspended than their white peers in figures from the 2015-2016 school year, according to the study. It also showed black boys and students with disabilities were impacted the most.

A federal Government Accountability Office report released around the same time found similar disparities. Distressingly, the disparity is actually growing despite efforts to address the problem.

The Data Collection blamed some of the disparity on implicit racial bias “on the part of teachers and staff (that) may cause them to judge students’ behaviors differently based on the students’ race and sex.”

The implicit bias can start when children are very young. Teachers unconsciously observe black preschool children more intently, looking for bad behavior, according to findings by the Yale Child Study Center. Not surprising then that black children are 3.6 times more likely to be suspended from preschool.

Reinforcing a good principle

Of course, reset rooms are not a panacea to school behavioral problems or the school-to-prison pipeline. In fact, nothing a school can offer will fix everything; the school environment can only be one part of an overall solution. Many of the challenges faced by today’s students stem from systemic issues, including impoverished communities with not enough opportunities; underfunded school districts; broken family structures and abuse; violence; and hunger.

But a reset room is a low-cost way to offer to so many students a chance - a chance to course-correct before they get off onto a track that leads to no good end.

Administrators and school systems cannot afford to not at least take a hard look at the idea of making reset rooms widespread. At minimum, they reinforce the principle, in a visible way, that suspension and expulsion should be the last resort when dealing with children, not the first, second or third.

Columnist Myron B. Pitts can be reached at mpitts@fayobserver.com or 910-486-3559.