Training helps defuse student anger in U46
By Dave Gathman dgathman@stmedianetwork.com Jan 25, 2011 10:04AM
Kelvin Lane (left), coordinator for student discipline in Elgin School District U46, demonstrates how he would position himself when dealing with an unruly student, portrayed by district safety intern Stacie Drozdik, at the U46 headquarters in Elgin on Jan. 14, 2011. The district is teaching staff how to use talk and body language to defuse student arguments before they become violent . | Michael Smart~Sun-Times Media
ELGIN — T
Three years ago, 22 students in Elgin School District U46 were expelled for assaulting school employees. Two years ago, 21 students were expelled for the same offense.
Last school year, there were two.
During the past three years, 850 to 900 students annually have been suspended from school for fighting with other students. This school year, however, is on track to finish with that number down 25 to 30 percent.
The eye-capturing stats did not result from any greater leniency in doling out punishments, according to U46 Safety Coordinator John Heiderscheidt. The credit goes to a staff training program called CPI — named for its inventor, the Milwaukee-based Crisis Prevention Institute — that shows teachers, deans and bus drivers how to defuse tense situations and dial down a student’s anger before he reaches the fighting stage.
Kelvin Lane, a 250-pound mountain of muscle who was hired two summers ago to be U46’s coordinator of student discipline, said that stat on student assaults hit him in the face when he left a dean’s job in Buffalo Grove-area High School District 214 to come to Elgin.
“I was shocked to see that there had been 31 expulsions the year before, and 21 of those were for assaults on staff members,” he recalls. “I asked John, ‘Why are these numbers so high?’ He said that we have dean’s assistants who see two students fighting. So they get in between the two to break it up, and the kids end up hitting the dean’s assistant.”
Lane mentioned that he had undergone training with the CPI organization in 1995 and that CPI offered some techniques to keep such things from happening. Heiderscheidt went through the training, too, and he was sold. Using $70,000 from a federal grant, in the summer of 2009 the district trained all the dean’s assistants and other administrators in CPI’s methods. The number of student-vs.-staffer assaults plunged 90 percent.
“The number of fights remained about the same,” Lane says. “But now we knew better ways of dealing with them” — such as not stepping in between the two belligerents.
This school year, all 380 school bus drivers went through the training; and during the Feb. 25 “institute day,” the entire staff of Streamwood High School will be trained. By the end of this school year, 674 employees will have been trained, and 23 will be qualified to train other people.
Don’t square off
Much of the technique has to do with body language, Lane says. For example, if a teacher is approaching a student who’s about to explode, it’s a big mistake to “invade his personal space” by getting too close. It’s also a mistake to face him so that both people’s shoulders are parallel to each other.
“Where I was growing up, they’d say you were squaring off with somebody,” Lane says. “Nowadays, kids would say, ‘You’re getting in my face.’ ” This body language leaves the student instinctively inclined to fight back.
Instead, CPI teaches that the staffer should approach the angry student from an oblique angle — more shoulder to shoulder instead of chest to chest.
CPI psychologists reminded that, according to many studies, everyone instinctively feels endangered and angry when someone gets too close or “invades our personal space.” So CPI trainers teach that a staffer going head to head (or, now, shoulder to chest) with an angry student should remain an arm’s length away.
“One exercise we do in training is for two people to approach each other until they’re very close and see how uncomfortable that is,” Heiderscheidt said.
Other parts of the training teach the staffers how to use their voices — a loud, sudden shout to divert the student’s attention and help break up a fight, but using a carefully modulated volume and speed to avoid exciting a student’s emotions during a discussion that the teacher doesn’t want to escalate into a fight.
Getting help
And CPI teaches that if two students are “going at it” physically and can’t be distracted by a shout, two staff members should get on each side of the fighters and pull them apart rather than having that dean insert himself in the middle and get struck by both.
“My goal is to train all staff at all (U46) buildings,” Heiderscheidt said.
And maybe that should even include the elected members of the district’s board of education.
“I worry from time to time about the security around us in this room,” board President Ken Kaczynski told Heiderscheidt after the board heard the director’s annual report on school safety and security this month.
Kaczynski said the safety of a school board meeting was especially on his mind because of how an angry, suicidal man had held a school board in Florida at gunpoint a few weeks ago.
Even here in Elgin, people attending school board meetings “seem to be ruder and angrier than they were 10 years ago,” board member Karen Carney said.
“The better we get at preventing violence,” Heiderscheidt said, “the more we can devote our resources to teaching and learning.”
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