In most public schools, when students misbehave badly enough, they're suspended from class and sent out of school. Ted Fuller says that was the tactic he used during his nine years serving as the dean of students at Hellgate High School.
"And in all those years I never saw it really work," he says, "especially with kids who really struggle all the time with behaving appropriately."
Fuller was appointed principal of Sentinel High School at the end of 2014. At the beginning of the 2015-16 academic calendar, his first full year at the school, he launched Refocus, an alternative program to suspension. The program offers students the option to avoid suspension and spend up to five days at a time with an instructor who asks them what's going on in their life, leads them in a community service activity, assigns their regular classwork and coaches them on appropriate responses to stress.
"And that's empowering for kids," Fuller says. "A lot of it helps kids understand who they are."
The new program is already showing results. Fuller says days of school missed to suspensions are down 36 percent in the first semester of 2015, compared to the first semester of 2014. He's hoping in the long term, students will emerge from Refocus with better self-esteem, self-awareness and commitment to graduation. He acknowledges Refocus students don't always get as much classwork completed as teachers would like, but points out that if the student was kicked out of school, it's unlikely they'd get very much work done, either.
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