For the sake of every boy and girl in the public school system in this community, the Glynn County Board of Education and school administration is doing more than just collecting facts and eye-scanning data on disciplinary issues. A lack of meaningful control is a sure invitation to danger and chaos.
Disciplinary statistics provided to the board of education at its work session Thursday are indeed disturbing. The number of incidents would be somewhere in the upper stratosphere if plotted on an atmospheric graph. They have grown that much since TBC, the time before COVID-19.
Data provided to the board represented the number of student disciplinary cases during the first semester only, from August through December, during the last three school years.
Here are the figures presented to the board: 899 incidents during the 2020-2021 school year; 1,601 during the 2021-2022 school year; and 2,154 during the most recently ended school semester. Disciplinary issues have increased by 140% in just three years.
Senetra Haywood, director of student services for the Glynn County School System, offered an explanation for the sharp rise. “We have a lot of things that we think are attributing to that,” Haywood told board members. “There’s a lot of social skill deficits with our kids, being able to resolve conflicts and talk through issues.” Haywood also noted that social media has given birth to new challenges.
She reminded the school board of this: “As we’ve discussed many times, our schools are a microcosm of our community, and so we’ve seen an uptick of violent behavior in our community and we are seeing it in our schools.”
A big contributor to the harrowing leap in disciplinary problems is COVID-19, Haywood pointed out. A lot of students have witnessed its destructiveness, having lost a parent, grandparent or other family member during the thick of the pandemic.
School administrators are working to resolve the crisis. Atlanta-based Kate’s Club, for example, is offering therapeutic services in partnership with the school system to children who lost someone dear to them during the pandemic. The mentorship program in middle schools also has been bolstered.
The question is whether it is enough to stop the climb in the number of violations committed by students. Is the school system and board doing everything they can to reverse this alarming trend? Are they using what powers federal and state governments have left them to ensure safe classrooms, safe corridors and safe grounds for our sons and daughters?
If the answer is anything less than “yes” to these questions, then the board and the administration have their work cut out for them.
