Education News
“The number one motivation we’re seeing (for student behavior problem referrals) is to gain peer attention.”
— Mount Abe Principal Shannon Warden
BRISTOL — The Mount Abraham Unified School District is making headway with some of the behavioral issues students have struggled with this fall, according to the central office and building administrators who provided the school board with an update at its Nov. 30 meeting.
Teachers and parents in the district have raised concerns about school safety and the learning environment over the past two months, following a number of disruptive and sometimes violent incidents at Bristol Elementary School (BES) and Mount Abraham Union Middle/High School.
On Oct. 12, BES teachers sounded the alarm after one of the school’s classrooms was destroyed by a student. On Nov. 1, a Mount Abe middle school student was taken to the hospital and another was later charged with assault after an attack in the school hallway. Later that month a BES parent filed a formal complaint alleging their child was sexually harassed on the school playground.
But by Nov. 30, things were getting better, BES Interim Principal David Wells and Mount Abe Principal Shannon Warden told the school board.
BRISTOL ELEMENTARY
“Entering the school year, we were looking at five students who had elevated behavior referrals, and some of the behaviors were really acute,” Wells said.
For a school with enrollment of 250, five is a lot, he noted.
After the school and district made adjustments, however, three of those students were receiving fewer behavioral referrals by late November and their ability to stay in classrooms and meet expectations had improved, Wells said.
“Is it where we want? No, it is not, but I can tell you from observations in visiting one of the classes multiple times a week: a student who had multiple occurrences of needing to go to the planning room — or needing to leave the classroom or having their classmates leave the classroom — is now successfully engaged in reading lessons (and) is very rarely — maybe two occurrences over the last month — needing to leave the classroom,” he explained.
In addition to providing regular classroom support and reinforcing expected behaviors, the school has also assigned a behavioral assistant to one of the classrooms to provide, among other things, “targeted additional reinforcement” for one of the students who is improving.
The behavioral assistant is also assigned to a second classroom, helping with the second and third of the improving students, which has allowed them to spend more time in class, Wells said.
For the two students still exhibiting acute behaviors, new behavioral plans are being written by a district Social and Emotional Learning coach who has been temporarily assigned to BES.
In the meantime, the district has hired another behavioral assistant to provide one-on-one support for one student, and was working with Green Mountain Behavioral Health to secure one-on-one support for the other student.
Over the course of the semester, the school has also increased the number of secure spaces in the building from one to four.
STATISTICS
As Mount Abe Principal Shannon Warden later explained at the same meeting, schools log two categories of office behavioral referrals, or ODRs:
- “Minor” ODRs include things like occasionally refusing to follow directions.
- “Major” ODRs include behaviors like yelling at adults, being disruptive in class or consistently refusing to follow directions.
Overall, Bristol Elementary has seen an uptick in ODRs compared with 2018-19, which was the last full year of fully in-person instruction before the pandemic.
Data provided to the Independent by MAUSD Assistant Superintendent Catrina DiNapoli shows the number of students with 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6+ referrals. According to that data, BES logged 467+ minor ODRs for the entire 2018-19 school year, as well as 301+ major ODRs.
In the first few months of the current school year, which has not yet reached the halfway point, BES has already surpassed 50% of the numbers logged in 2018-19 — with 237+ minor ODRs and 165+ major ODRs — despite having fewer students this year.
Similar data for the first few months of 2021-22 show that Mount Abe has already eclipsed the number of ODRs recorded for the entire 2018-19 school year.
Whereas the school logged 544+ minor ODRs and 466+ major ODRs for a total of 1,010+ in 2018-19, it has already logged 690+ minor ODRs and 467+ major ODRs this year, for a total 1,157+.
The district also tracks the motivations behind behaviors, when possible, Warden said. And “the number one motivation we’re seeing is to gain peer attention.”
That’s not terribly surprising after a year of hybrid learning, when students attended in-person classes only two days a week, were grouped into very small cohorts and faced other pandemic-related restrictions that limited opportunities to practice social skills, she explained.
Warden also noted that it was likely the district would see an uptick in behaviors leading up to the December break, which is a common occurrence.
MOUNT ABE
The middle/high school has seen an increase in the reporting of potential hazing, harassment and bullying, which has prompted multiple investigations, Warden told the board.
“We continue to use BPD (Bristol Police Department) for prevention, support and safety measures as necessary,” she said. “We find them to be very responsive. They focus on relationship building, as well as education, intervention and consequences.”
At the same time, “we have a growing wait list for school-based clinicians or school social worker support,” she said.
One of the district’s partners, Counseling Service of Addison County (CSAC), has had trouble finding clinicians, she explained.
“They’d happily bring more on board. They just are not out there.”
It’s a problem that’s being felt statewide. Collectively, CSAC and its counterparts in Vermont are having trouble filling hundreds of open positions.
In a follow-up with the Independent, Warden noted that seven Mount Abe students had been waiting for school-based clinician (SBC) or school social worker (SSW) support.
“We meet weekly and identify additional students,” she said. “Some students can transition from SBC to CSAC support directly.”
Bristol Elementary doesn’t have a waitlist, Wells told the Independent, “but we feel there are 36 students who could benefit from a school-based clinician or social work services.”
Elementary principals in Lincoln, Monkton, New Haven and Starksboro reported that service providers had limited space, had busy caseloads or were “at capacity,” but there wasn’t currently a waitlist at any of the schools.
MAUSD hopes to add additional Social and Emotional Learning interventionists “to provide more support for students exhibiting inappropriate behaviors and allow for more skilled instruction,” at Mount Abe, Warden said.
DEAN OF STUDENTS
The district also plans to hire a Dean of Students to provide additional administrative support throughout the district.
Such support is especially needed by Wells at BES and by Principal Edorah Frazer at Robinson Elementary School in Starksboro, which Reen told the Independent is also seeing elevated levels of acute behavioral issues.
Work performed by this new administrator would free Wells and Frazer up to “do the other roles of a principal — being an educational leader and checking in on the other aspects of our school,” Wells said.
Warden echoed Wells’s concern.
“We’ve had a behavior assistant position that’s been posted since pretty much the beginning of the year that we’ve been unable to fill, so in consultation with Patrick (Reen) we regrouped and came at it in a different way to say, ‘OK, what if we advertise two different positions at kind of a higher level to try to attract more qualified candidates that will be able to provide a higher level of support and instruction.”
Staffing issues are not just an MAUSD problem, Warden noted.
“I meet pretty much every Monday with colleagues around the state and many, many are having difficulties filling these positions.”
GUN THREAT
Just days after the Nov. 30 MAUSD board meeting, conflict of a different sort emerged at Mount Abe.
On Thursday, Dec. 2, as previously reported in the Independent, tensions among students wearing or waving politically themed banners and flags at school evolved into “inappropriate, disrespectful, hurtful, hateful dialogue between students and adults,” Warden told parents in a memo that night.
After the school banned the use of flags and banners as attire that day, social media activity prompted school officials and local law enforcement to investigate a possible gun threat against the school. Late Thursday night officials determined the threat was not credible.
The following day nearly 90% of Mount Abe students stayed home from school.
In later statements to the community the MAUSD administration and school board vowed there would be “no tolerance for disrespect, hate speech, inappropriate language, violence of any kind, or other behaviors that are not appropriate for schools. In addition, students who are not capable of meeting these expectations will receive appropriate consequences.”
The school board also issued a statement in support of Superintendent Patrick Reen, recognizing “the effort he has made towards continuing to improve outcomes for our learners during very challenging times.”
BREAKDOWN
Presentations by Wells and Warden at the Nov. 30 meeting followed those of the four other MAUSD elementary principals, who had told a story about a fictional but realistic student with behavioral issues and wove it into explanations about various district approaches to student supports.
Later in the meeting, board member Erin Jipner of Bristol noted that “what was common through all the presentations” was a focus on what was supposed to happen after a behavioral event.
“And when I heard from teachers who came to the (Oct. 12 board) meeting and openly spoke about what occurred (at BES), it didn’t appear to me that those steps were followed or met with a response,” Jipner said. “So I’m wondering what was the breakdown….”
Jipner didn’t get an answer.
“That would be difficult for me to parse out right here, tonight,” Reen said. “That would take some conversation with David (Wells) and others to talk that through. I don’t know that I can respond with the detail that you’re looking for right now to that question. But it’s certainly one we can think about and talk about for a future meeting.”
Ten days later, the Independent asked Reen about the difficulties of such “parsing” and whether he and Wells and others had talked anything through since the meeting.
“No comment,” Reen said.
DETECTIVE WORK
Trying to figure out what is happening with students is a little bit like detective work, requiring curiosity and empathy, Lincoln Elementary School Principal Tory Riley told the board on Nov. 30:
“It’s really, really hard work. It takes patience, it takes skill, it takes years and years of experience — and even then, we don’t always get it right.”
It’s also important after an incident to look beyond the student, she said.
“As educators, we really need to … look at the strength of our system and see if there are places where we might bolster it, change it, tweak it, and again be curious about our system and wonder, ‘How can we make this better?’ so that students … have a better shot at learning and maintaining self-regulation.”
Reach Christopher Ross at christopherr@addisonindependent.com.
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