Whatever It Takes
How many school principals can say that they have said to their disruptive students, “I’ll see you at your house tonight,” and mean it?
Geoffrey Canada is an education and social-services reformer who leads the path breaking Harlem Children’s Zone Project. One of the chief tenets of his program is the belief that children respond to the consistent leadership of the adults in charge. That when the adults in charge are unafraid to deal with the serious issues in a school that children will respond with respect to this leadership. Canada says, “word gets out and once students realize that you will be at their house, behaviors begin to change.” He admits it’s hard work but work that pays off.
Early on in his education career Canada learned that no child could thrive in a school in which there is violence or fear. He believes all school principals should take on the role of being the new sheriff in town. A sheriff that is both loving and firm.
In the Harlem project violence is not tolerated and that means all violence. If a child gets into a fight outside of school it is still regarded as an offense to the school’s code of conduct. All the adults who work in these schools are also highly involved in the community. The schools offer an integrated approach to education. Students receive both academic and social services. Families are offered counseling, after school programs and health plans.
In what he describes as a conveyor belt approach to education children begin school with an intensive all day pre K program. Parents are also involved with workshops on learning skills to improve their roles in their child’s life.
In these schools underprivileged children are thriving. But it’s only because it’s founders have embraced the “whatever it takes” mantra. They have created a holistic system and sealed up all the cracks in which a child can fall into.
In order for this project to have prospered they had to experience horrible outcomes year after year. Students whose futures were no employment and often jail. No school in American wants to face failure of that extreme. Yet without the type of consistent extraordinary interventions that outcome can become a possibility.
Any school facing a crisis in dealing with student behaviors needs to first unite their entire staff in solving the problem. All staff has to agree to sign on to extra-ordinary measures. All staff must regard their own role as an adult leader in the school. Students will see the consistent and logical consequences to bad behavior. It’s important to embrace this type of measure with a loving heart, so children feel safe and supported. The school becomes an extension of a loving parent and the students who go there will prosper.