New Mount Greylock Handbook Outlines Restorative Practices for Discipline
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Mount Greylock Regional School Committee on Thursday reviewed an updated middle-high school student handbook that includes the new student behavior code the district has developed over the past year.
In conjunction with consultants from the Chicago-based non-profit The Equity Imperative, the district last year began a process of categorizing "disruptive or harmful behavior," outlining the district's responses and specifying how families will be notified.
"That involves three tiers of behavior and associated responses," Superintendent Joseph Bergeron told the committee. "These behavior matrices detail all we've workshopped both within the working group over the past year and, more publicly, as we worked through spring and summer."
The new content comes in the handbook's Section VIII, titled "Rules, Regulations and Procedures."
The first tier of offenses, labeled "Minor/Low-Level Behaviors" include things like "off-task behavior," "talking out of turn" and "profanity." Responses start with techniques like "verbal redirection" and a "classroom restorative circle" and elevate to "detention referral" and "loss of break/recess."
Tier 2 behaviors, dubbed "Moderate/Recurrent Behaviors," include "major or repeated documented defiance," "excessive classroom disruption," bullying and "verbal slurs, discrimination or harassment." Those cases would draw responses ranging from a "restorative conference" between the student, teacher and administrator or counselor, a family meeting and in-school or after-school detention.
"Major/High-Level Behaviors," Tier 3 in the district matrix, include assault, "ongoing threatening behavior or bullying, sexual harassment, "recording/photographing without explicit permission" and "theft or vandalism greater than or equal to $250." Tier 3 behavior also would lead to a family meeting at a minimum but also could include "restitution and apology process," in-school or out-of-school suspension, referral to the commonwealth's Department of Children and Families and, ultimately, alternative placement of the student.
"It reflects trying to make sure that we are addressing behavior in its root cause, that we are trying to take steps to restore relationships and education students as a first step, that we are putting communication with families in various forms very much up front and that all responses to behavior are progressive in nature — except the most severe, Tier 3-type behavior, where we really need to jump straight from being notified to taking action that is more traditional, which would involve separation from the school population to maintain safety," Bergeron explained.
The Student/Family Handbook is a product of the administration, meaning the School Committee did not need to vote to approve the document. But committee member Carolyn Greene noted that the handbook should align with the district handbook, which includes, among other things, a section on student discipline.
Bergeron told the committee that one of his goals for the year ahead is to find ways to pare down the handbook, which currently has more than 110 pages, and make it more user friendly for students and families.
"In Massachusetts, these handbooks are often the place for legal compliance and state compliance," Bergeron said. "We, as a school district, make sure that everything the state says we're required to have in there, everything our lawyer recommends we have so that we can do it or we make sure families know we're doing it. What that leads to, over the course of many years is just a lot of stuff.
"In time for next year, we'll be whittling away at this, working with state requirements and legal counsel and internally to figure out how we can make this a more immediately useful to families and staff document, rather than just being compliant, which it very much is."
Revising the handbook is an "informal" goal for the first-year superintendent.
The School Committee also voted to accept the state-mandated superintendent goals that Bergeron previously discussed with the elected panel at its September meeting. Among those goals are demonstrating "an increased student and staff sense of belonging through Panorama survey data responses," developing a way to share incident data with the community at large, creating a Community and Culture Committee to find ways to increase the sense of belonging in the three-school district, demonstrating students' progress through diagnostic assessment, rolling out a new math curriculum and examining the challenges of Mount Greylock's "current schedule and course offerings."
The School Committee will assess Bergeron's progress at addressing the stated goals when it conducts an annual performance review.
In other business on Thursday, the School Committee closed the books on fiscal year 2025 for the district, appointed Greene to represent the committee at the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees and discussed an addition to the district's graduation requirements to incorporate new state standards for "competency" in the wake of last November's statewide vote to get rid of the "high-stakes MCAS" as a requirement for a high school diploma.
"Right now, if someone wants to graduate from a high school in Massachusetts, they need to both meet both the local graduation requirements, which is you've taken the following courses and distribution of courses and so on, as well as they need to meet this competency determination bar, which is an assessment of what skills you've developed within specific areas," Bergeron said. "That's where this language comes in."
The proposed policy is being developed by the School Committee's Policy Subcommittee, working off a model policy put forward by the MASC in August, Bergeron said.
Policy Subcommittee Chair Jose Constantine said the group plans to bring a final draft to the School Committee for approval at its Nov. 6 meeting.
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