There are implications when public schools fail to prepare for Emotional Behavioral Disorders (EBD) in K-12 public schools. Students who struggle with EBD sometimes display symptoms and have patterns consistent with one or more of the following behaviors: aggressiveness toward peers, parents, and staff; truancy; academic difficulty; poor relationships with peers; high rates of suspensions and/or expulsions; and general overall disruptive school behaviors that educators commonly categorize as “antisocial” in the school setting. Students with EBD typically have social difficulty in relating to both peers and adults. Additionally, students with EBD tend to experience academic difficulties at multiple levels, which are linked, possibly causally, to their behavioral excess and deficits.
It is a harsh truth that growing numbers of children in the public school exhibit disruptive,
or externalizing behavior (also referred to as antisocial, challenging, defiant, noncompliant, aggressive, and acting-out behavior), beyond the occasional minor incidents typical of most children during the normal course of their development. Such behavior has become one of the most pressing issues in schools. Over the past 4 years, disciplinary measures for K-12 students in public school at Bataan National High School across the country have dramatically shifted. Schools used to be punitive, consequence driven systems, where students were expected to behave in “socially acceptable” ways. When behavior was disruptive or challenging, students were simply given consequences, including suspension, and even expulsion. While such consequences still exist today in school systems, there are many research-based strategies that demonstrate that a proactive and positive approach to teaching behavior expectations can have a great impact on schools. There is a plethora of research now available to schools and school administrators to guide the work of school districts in the area of student conduct. Indeed, there is increasing sentiment among educators that student conduct is just as important to teach as traditional content areas, for example, reading, and math.
In the interest of reforming education and assisting every student to be successful, many districts employ strategies that attempt to serve students proactively. These strategies typically pinpoint antecedents, instead of focusing on the consequences of socially unacceptable behavior. However, the extent to which administrators manage, lead, and work with students’ anti-social school behaviors—and the extent to which they collect and analyze building-level student conduct and office referral data—remains unknown.
It is important to understand the strategies school administrators use to make data based decisions, both for individual students and for overall building-programs when they consider anti-social or unacceptable school behavior in their schools. I’m curious about the ways administrators perceive and define the barriers to serving all children. To gain a comprehensive understanding of this process, it is necessary to gather data about administrators’ perceptions about practices that do and do not work in their schools, as they seek to facilitate positive outcomes that lead to behavior success.
There is a concern in education that behavior incidents are still prevalent in schools narrates this concern clearly: despite the progress that has been made in identifying and modifying variables that affect antisocial behavior, few would argue that our society has made progress in reducing the incidence of such behavior or the proportion of young people in our society who engage in such behavior. Recently, the antisocial, and even violent, behavior of some children in Bataan National High School has become a most pressing concern .Compounding the issue is the fact that public school staff are held responsible for ensuring safe environments where all children can learn appropriate academic and social skills.
While national data is very compelling in this area, and despite efforts within educational systems throughout the various School-Wide Positive Behavior Support systems, incident data show steadily increasing numbers of students being removed from classrooms and/or suspended from schools. As more youth are diagnosed with varying degrees of emotional and behavioral disorders, school systems must prepare to deal with a diversity of mental and behavior needs to ensure that they not only have systems and teachers ready to respond, but also scaffold supports for students. This study examines one important problem facing schools: how best to design programming in K-12 schools to meet the needs of students with behavioral disorders. One aspect of the problem is that schools look for placements outside of a student’s traditional classroom setting or home school location when students become unruly and aggressive. Instead, schools should identify the student or system-specific problem, and then develop systems and program options in a continuum format to meet the diverse behavioral needs of its population.
By: Jennifer N. Tallorin | T-I | Bataan National High School
