In yesterday’s deep dive report into the Manitowoc Public School District, we took a look at what the District is doing to address its educational shortfalls.
Today our focus will be on student behavior.
The MPSD asked staff members to answer one simple question, “Do you feel your building’s behavior plan is working?”
The results were quite definitive. Just shy of 9% of respondents said it was, 21.8% were unsure, and 69.3% said no, it is not working.
Superintendent Jim Feil put it bluntly saying, “It’s a problem…Sometimes you see that you are working toward good things, but you aren’t necessarily paying attention…Things you don’t pay attention to can then sometimes go awry. My sense was something was happening here and we weren’t paying attention.”
The district also asked staff who left the district, whether due to retirement, finding a new job, or simply leaving the education profession, why they left.
Of the 37 people surveyed, 15% cited safety concerns.
You can see all of their responses below.
While there is a mental health safety aspect to it, Feil said that most of that would be physical safety.
He told us he is reiterating to principals in his schools that he has zero tolerance for fighting.
“Does that happen? Yes, but not routinely,” Feil admitted. “But again, if we are not paying attention, and we are allowing things to advance and get out of hand, eventually you have fights, and more fights. We can stop that, and we will. I think we are already taking steps to do that.”
The student behavior issue is one that has been on the minds of staff members for quite some time, and the push toward fixing it began before Feil came to town.
“We had teachers, and administrators, retired teachers who came back six months ago to say, ‘We need to do something about this,’” he said. “We recognized we didn’t even have a code of conduct in place. They volunteered their time every week to come together to study this issue.”
Both surveys were conducted last school year, so we asked Feil if he believes that the responses would be different this year.
He said that they “most definitely” would shift in a positive direction.
“I don’t think we are done,” he said. “I still think this needs time. People need to get in routines. They need to make sure we are consistent on expectations. We have to be monitoring reporting. We have already started some survey work, we will continue to do more.”
That being said, Feil said they simply need “more data to be able to tell how well we are doing.”
Tomorrow we will take a look at the enrollment numbers in the MPSD.
