Another short one

Noticing lately that a number of schools here will hand you a roster with columns marking SPED and ELD for the class, and let you send that back to the office carried by a student for attendance--as long as you don't tell the kid what that means, it shouldn't be a problem, but supposing the paper gets seen by someone who does know, or talked about between the kids, wondering what it means, and someone else should overhear? Is that some kind of potential legal issue?

One other area of concern about confidentiality would be the behavior intervention process. But almost in the opposite way, in that too much is withheld from view. The rule is not to list anyone's name other than the student being written up, because otherwise those people could have access to the file on that student? Are parents of the victims, so to speak, of repeated classroom disruptions ever notified?

Much more than simply sending a kid to the office at the teacher's discretion, behavior issues have become a huge focus in Spokane because of the sheer number of suspensions over the years, and the disproportionate time out of school assigned to minorities. Time out makes sense for play, but when applied to work, it’s time off. In a profound sense, it's lost time.

With an emphasis on restorative dialogue now, rather than punishment, the logic of nonviolence comes into play. Who is the oppressor? The conflict in the classroom is hardly ever physical in any case, but it could be that short of physically violent outbursts, the power is actually in favor of the ignorant--in the short term, as they can waste everyone's time, starting with their own, but of course the path they are set on leads to police and prisons eventually if they cannot change it.

How are you going to have a restorative dialogue, a conversation, with someone who won’t talk to you? If you have no authority in their eyes, perhaps you have to play their games with them before they feel like there is anything worth talking to you about.