September 24, 2008, Greenwood, MS – How do we get schools to keep students in schools where they can learn, rather than pushing them into the pipeline from schoolhouse to jailhouse?
That is what 48 parents, students and community members from under-performing school districts in the Mississippi Delta came together to learn in Greenwood, MS at a workshop on Positive Behavior Intervention Strategies prepared by the MS Delta Catalyst Roundtable.
The REACH MS program of the University of Southern Mississippi provided the training under a grant from the US Department of Education and the MS Department of Education Office of Special Education.
The training was designed to enable parents to understand how to build models of intervention by parents with their children, teachers with their students, students with online valium buy other students, and educators phentermine no prescription needed with other educators, based on dignity, self-respect and respect for others, without resort to violence or exclusion of students from school.
Southern Echo Education Coordinator Helen Johnson noted, “It is really about how we want to be treated as individuals and as a community.”
In this program students, parents and educators learn to negotiate together clear rules so that all parties have ownership of and buy-in to the dispute resolution model. The model teaches discipline and self-discipline rather than power and punishment as the basis for relationships among individuals, within classrooms, school-wide, district-wide and in community. Each school district creates a team, including students and parents, which decides rewards for positive behavior, consequences for negative behavior, and adopts the rules by which everyone shall be governed.
Click here to see more pictures from this training.
