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Date: 5/27/2022
LUDLOW – After receiving letters from students at Ludlow High School for a civics project, the School Committee spoke with one student about an increase in fights and bad behavior at the schools during its May 24 meeting.
The student, Lucas Costa, summed up his letter and said he noticed worse behavior at both the high school and Baird Middle School.
“What I mostly wrote about was addressing the behavior shown at primarily the high school and middle school because during the current school year I have witnessed and heard about fights occurring in school and the staff has done a good job quickly handling them and stopping them, but I had written to talk about ways to make sure the fights don’t happen at all,” he said.
Costa added that there were other instances where students would try to misbehave to be removed from the classroom.
Interim Superintendent Lisa Nemeth said the district did notice a spike in fights at school.
“At the beginning of the year we did see an increase in fights, and we actually were very shocked because Ludlow High School used to have one or two fights a year and it became one or two fights a week,” she said.
Nemeth said the coronavirus pandemic could be the culprit behind changes in student behavior.
“We hate to keep blaming COVID [-19], but we go back to there was two years where students didn’t understand socialization and became very frustrated very easily,” she said. “After looking at all the data and reading different reports coming out of the state, the country and other schools, we have seen students not being able to cope or handle stress appropriately.”
Following the spike in fights and other behavior, Nemeth said the district increased how often students met with social workers and their counselors.
Nemeth said the plan for next year is to change the district’s disciplinary policies.
“I think next year we hopefully won’t have masks; I think that was part of it, that students could hide behind masks and hide their true feelings, so we are going to kind of do a total revamp over the summer, look at the discipline policy as students sometimes look to get detentions so they can spend the day in in-house,” she said.
Nemeth said the approach at the high school and middle school were two completely different methods.
“One other thing we learned is they are so dramatically different, so the middle school was more about restorative practices meaning, ‘let’s think about our behavior and think about why you’re upset,’ which is fine but then they got to the high school, and it was ‘boom you’re going to detention or boom you’re suspended,’” she said. “There was a really big disconnect so we’re going to put the two together.”
In revamping the discipline policy, Nemeth said the district will look to include more detentions and suspensions at the middle school and more of the restorative practices at the high school. Costa said including those changes could provide a benefit at the high school.
Nemeth also noted the increase in bad behaviors inside the classroom.
“The disruptive behaviors in the classrooms, we’ve definitely seen an increase in that. I think our teachers need some retraining on coping skills and giving kids breaks, even if it’s as simple as a stand up and stretch every five minutes, that might decrease the anxiety or boredom that some kids are feeling,” she said.
Nemeth said the district will also look to work with the student council before or at the beginning of the upcoming school year to come up with solutions.
In a recent change, Nemeth said students seemed to care less about their grades than they did just a few years ago.
“We’re always retraining our teachers on how to deal with emotions but now we have to take a look at students who don’t care if they fail or if they’re getting 50s, they don’t care. Where five years ago they were scrambling, now they’re just like ‘I’ll retake the class,’ so we have to retrain our teachers and philosophies,” she said.
After he was asked by Committee Chair Chip Harrington if social media was a factor, Costa said it may be.
“I think it could be, probably primarily Snapchat. I don’t have it, but I do know a lot of people that do. If they can, they try to get a video and try to record the fights,” he said.
Harrington also asked Costa if he thought TikTok was a factor, but he said because of the censorship on the platform, violence is typically marked with a warning or is removed. Nemeth added that in the past the district has suspended students for recording fights because it is an inappropriate use of cell phones at school.
Committee member Ron Saloio said he saw a similar experience on the football field during the prior year with a fight and then teammates trying to record the video.
“I was amazed that kids on the same team would pick a fight with each other and then go around videotaping it to so they can put it on social media. It’s insane to me,” he said.
Committee member Sarah Bowler said the consequences of bad behavior at school need to be followed up at home.
“We can do as much as we want as a district to put the consequences in place at school – suspensions, detentions, whatever our consequences are – but if there aren’t consequences at home, then what we do at school doesn’t matter,” she said. “It has to be an alignment.”
Interim Student Representative Matt Favata, who was appointed at the meeting, said he had concerns about lunchtime behaviors.
“I feel like we might need to be stricter about where kids go during lunch because when kids can bunch off in their own little corner it’s hard for every teacher who is watching. I think students don’t have as many rules as to where they can go during lunch and I think that has contributed to the fights,” he said. “It’s nuts.”
Nemeth said once she resumes her role as principal at the high school, she will address the lunchtime behaviors. She added that a lot of the rules at lunch were relaxed due to spacing concerns with COVID-19.
The discussion required no formal action, but Nemeth said she and the administrative team will continue to look at ways to address the behavioral changes at school.
The Ludlow School Committee next meets on June 14 and coverage of that meeting will appear in the June 24 edition of The Reminder.