Education Week - November 14, 2018 - 12

Principals Confront Bad Behavior From Students and Parents
from within their own ranks?
This is not a new challenge for
principals and other school leaders.
In 1990, Education Week published
a story about headmasters of several
Washington-area private schools imploring parents to stop allowing students to throw large, unsupervised
parties where "excessive drinking
and sexual license are common." But
questions around what role principals and educators play in shaping
student behavior, judgment, and
character are increasingly front
and center, amid the reach of social
media and shifting cultural expectations driven by the #MeToo movement and, most recently, the controversial hearings for U.S. Supreme
Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who
was accused decades later of sexual
assault while in high school.
Three recent examples highlight
the thorny, sometimes criminal behaviors that school leaders must
confront:
Five teenagers in Damascus, Md.,
have been charged with second-degree rape for allegedly assaulting or
attempting to assault four of their
junior varsity football teammates
with a broom in a locker room.
Leaders in the Montgomery County,
Md., school system said they are
investigating whether the incident
is part of a broader hazing culture
at Damascus High School. Superintendent Jack Smith and two other
senior district leaders sent a video
message to all high school students
condemning the acts and reminding students that those who harass,
bully, or abuse others will be held
accountable.
A video of high school students
in Southlake, Texas, chanting the
"N-word" quickly circulated on social media last month, according to
local media. Although the racist incident occurred off-campus, district
officials demanded that the video be
taken down and said in a letter to
parents and staff that students involved would be disciplined.
A principal in Maryland who
sought to crack down on underage
drinking at prom in 2016 barred
students who were caught doing so
from participating in commencement ceremonies, but the disciplinary measures were reversed by the
interim superintendent, according
to local media.

Uncharted Waters
Oftentimes, though, principals can
feel like they are in uncharted waters. Such was the case for Mary Pat
Cumming, the principal at the FAIR
School, an arts-magnet high school
in Minneapolis.
A student, along with her mother,
recently approached Cumming with
a specific request. Could she, they
asked, require students to take sexual-consent and -assault training?
Their case was compelling. Seventeen-year-old Isadora Colón told
Cumming she had been sexually
assaulted, and neither she nor her
mother wanted another student to go
through the confusion and helpless-

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

The FAIR School Principal Mary Pat Cumming, left, is working with student Isadora Colón, center, and her mother, Natalie Hart, to develop a course on consent.

ness they had felt as they tried to figure out what to do after the assault.
And should the worst happen, Isadora and her mother, Natalie Hart,
wanted families to know what to do.
Isadora was moved to talk to
Cumming as she listened to student
chatter taking place at the height of

I know I stuck my
neck out, but... I'd do
it again. If one kid
benefits from it, then
I've done my job."
JESSICA SCHULTZ
Principal, J.W. Mitchell High School
Pasco County, Fla.

the hearings for Kavanaugh. What
she heard students saying about the
accusations against Kavanaugh was
alarming. She was worried that her
peers saw youth as a kind of get-outof-jail-free card.
"Students were saying, 'oh, he was
just young, he didn't know what he
was doing,' or kind of making the
perpetrator the victim in the story,"
she said. "And I think that in itself
was a clear sign that there needs to
be some sort of program, teaching
about how it's not just the fact that
the perpetrator is young and naïve,
it's that the perpetrator isn't aware
of consent, doesn't know about it."
Cumming agreed right away to
take on Isadora's request. But after
surveying her fellow principals in
the district, she realized no one was

12 | EDUCATION WEEK | November 14, 2018 | www.edweek.org

tackling the issue with a comprehensive curriculum. She's building
her own, with input from Isadora
and her mother and with experts
from community groups who'll
talk with students about consent
throughout the upcoming semester.
All students are taking part, Cumming said, and parents, too, will be
brought into the discussions.
The program will also focus on
perpetrators of sexual assault, at
Isadora's request, and how they and
their families should handle coming
to terms with their actions.
The hope, Isadora said, is that if
other families find themselves in the
same position, they won't feel as lost
as she and her mother did.
"Before my experience, I'd never
ever in my life heard before, 'If you
are assaulted, the first step you
should take is 'blank,' " said Isadora.
"I had never heard anyone tell me ...
what I should do in that situation."
Her mother said this is the time to
make the greatest impact.
"The more we do talk about it ...
we can change the conversation,"
said Hart. "Reaching people when
they're young, when they're hitting puberty ... that's the golden
opportunity."

Schools vs. Parents
About 9 percent of young people
ages 14 to 21 have committed some
type of sexual violence, be it attempted rape, rape, or sexual coercion, according to a 2013 study by
researchers from the Center for Innovative Public Health Research in
San Clemente, Calif., and the University of New Hampshire.
Thirty percent of high school students drink some alcohol, according
to the federal Centers for Disease

Control's 2017 Youth Risk Behavior
Survey, and 14 percent binge drink.
And 22 percent of Americans experienced hazing during high school,
according to a 2017 YouGov poll.
These behaviors-drinking, hazing, and sexual violence-often happen in varying combinations. And
even when those behaviors occur
completely outside of school, they
often have a dramatic effect on students' learning.
Although there is a lot of focus on
preventing hazing and sexual assault
on college campuses, these behaviors usually start before then, said
Michele Ybarra, the chief executive
officer and research director of the
Center for Innovative Public Health
Research and one of the co-authors of
the study on sexual violence.
"Our research does support this
idea that sexual violence does seem
to be emerging in high school, and
we need to be talking to our teenagers and we need to be talking to
them before they start having sex,"
Ybarra said. "We need to talk about
consent before that."
A range of factors can contribute
to a student's behavior, said Ybarra,
such as seeing spousal abuse in the
home, watching violent pornography, being a victim of sexual violence, and drinking alcohol.
She said educators can play an
important role in helping teenagers make healthy choices outside of
school.
But it's not entirely up to schools.
Parents have the most critical influence, said Caitlin Abar, an assistant
professor at the State University of
New York at Brockport, who studies
parental influence on young adults'
substance abuse.
"Perhaps contrary to popular
belief, while peers are an impor-

tant element, in the vast majority of healthy adolescents, parents
maintain an important role in their
lives," she said. "While adolescents
may seek peers on social processes,
they're still checking in with their
parents on the big issues."
Sometimes, principals have to
contend with parents aiding and
abetting teenage drinking, as was
the case in a Bethesda, Md., high
school in the fall semester of 2016.
Three local teenagers had died in
alcohol-related car accidents in the
past two years. After learning of
students drinking at parties while
the parents were home, the school's
principal emailed all parents, imploring them not to allow students
to drink or provide them with alcohol. The principal warned that not
only are there hefty fines for adults
who allow underage drinking to
take place in their homes, there is
also the risk that teenagers will get
into a bad accident.

Pervasive Drinking
Abar said the notion that allowing
adolescents to drink under parental
supervision helps demystify drinking and teaches young adults their
limits, is a myth. Sometimes called
the "European model," Abar said
young European adults have higher
rates of substance abuse.
"Alcohol, drugs, they're not
friendly to brain cells," she said. "We
know that the earlier that you are
exposed, the more likely you are to
be addicted."
At J.W. Mitchell High School in
Pasco County, Fla., Principal Jessica Schultz is attacking underage
drinking by focusing on educating
parents.
Schultz realized that some stu-

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Education Week - November 14, 2018

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