School districts around the country have been struggling to figure out how to deal with the increase in student behavior issues in the classroom, including locally.
Most large school districts, such as the Manitowoc Public School District have seen an increase in student behavior issues ever since classes went back to in-person full-time, but the MPSD is actively looking to resolve the issue.
Back in December of 2021, then Superintendent Mark Holzman said there is a behavior crisis in the MPSD.
Around the same time, the Ad-Hoc Student Behavior Advisory Committee was formed.
Since then they have been actively looking at how they can resolve this crisis.
The group met last week, and School Board President Stacey Soeldner was present.
She told Seehafer News they need to get it under control for a couple of reasons.
“It has been a reason why we have lost long-term teachers,” she explained. “It’s also been a reason why kids may go to a different school. But probably the number one thing is it’s very difficult to provide adequate learning to students when there are such disruptive behaviors.”
She also explained that the group was formed by “Veteran teachers, veteran community members, parents were very passionate about this and donated their time to come on board.”
The big thing being worked on right now is the student code of conduct.
The group has been looking over other school districts’ codes for inspiration, but also to ensure there are no loopholes.
Board Member Kathy Willis explained that the Code of Conduct needs to be broad, yet specific.
“The specificity part of it is so that our parents and our students, and including our staff, have a real understanding of what it all entails. So we don’t see loopholes,” she explained. “Broad because there are going to be things that we don’t think of that may come up. So you need to have something that’s broad enough o cover those sort of loopholes.”
A perfect example of that revolves around vaping. 20 years ago, vaping was not a thing that school districts had to worry about.
So, when many of them wrote their Codes of Conduct, vaping was not explicitly stated, so students were getting away with it.
The group will continue to address the Code of Conduct, and will then bring it forward to students and parents to make sure they are all on the same page.
