Our public school CLASSROOMS must be sacred.   All schools must make every effort to ensure that what goes on in the classroom is simply pure and powerful instruction.   The classroom should be a haven of LEARNING and nothing more.

Today, the public school classroom is where children are getting their meals, catching up on their sleep, releasing justified but misplaced anger or anxiety on their classmates and teachers, or sitting quietly but completely disengaged.    Many of these children are not capable of learning and large numbers of teachers are not capable of teaching because they are either feeding, waking, redirecting, or ignoring their students.

So our classrooms need to be sacred places of learning and not the place for a meal, a nap, a fight or inactivity.  And it IS that simple.   To do that, we have to make some serious changes.

First, we have to acknowledge that ANY problem rearing its head in a classroom that can’t be solved by a teacher with about 30 seconds of developmentally appropriate practices needs to be REMOVED from the classroom at that moment.    At that very moment.    A phone or intercom call needs to happen and a cheerful, loving interventionist needs to come do his or her job.    His or her job would be to get that student directly to the resource he needs so the student can return to the classroom.   Depending on the problem, the student might go back in 30 minutes, 30 hours or 30 days.    But problems that are not easily resolved by a teacher need to be solved by someone else outside the classroom.

Second, we have to put in place those resources and personnel to deal with the issues that get removed from the classroom.    Those resources will need to be prepared to fix temporary and chronic problems.   Social and Mental health workers in every school can address hunger, anxiety, abuse, anger, depression, truancy, and the list goes on.   We need Social and Mental health workers in every school who can help children and families resolve issues so that they are ready and able to function in the classroom.   If they can’t function in the classroom, they don’t belong in it.    This means some changes in staffing.    We have to have trained Social and Mental health staff in the schools, and we have to have enough to do the job.   One per school may not cut it.

If anyone thinks the services I am talking about offering in the schools by Social and Mental health workers don’t belong in the school system, I have a news flash for you.   These services are already being provided – by overworked teachers who are not trained or prepared to do those jobs.   Our teachers and guidance counselors are already trying to provide these services because these problems are front and center in their classrooms every day and they have to be addressed before learning can occur.  They are preventing learning for EVERY kid in the classroom.   Teachers and guidance counselors are NOT who should be working with these problems in the regular classroom.

Third, we have to have the classroom SPACE for Social and Mental health workers to do their jobs.  Yes, they need classrooms that are developmentally appropriate places in the school where they can work with the kids, their families and the outside agencies they may be bringing in to help them. They need classrooms where children who are working on their issues can be safe and supervised and sometimes even working on school work while they are getting themselves together to get back into the traditional classroom.    This is like nothing we have ever seen, but the deal is this:  if kids can’t be in the traditional or sacred learning environment, we can’t send them home to do nothing. And ISS (In school suspension) is one of the worst ideas we have ever had in public education.   Kids in ISS or at home usually don’t improve and many of their parents don’t have the resources or desire to do what it takes to get them back in the classroom.   We have to help them and we can do it at school – just with different professionals in another room.

The kid who is working on anger management issues needs a place to have his tantrum.   The kid who lives in a car and hasn’t eaten over the weekend needs a place to get himself together.   The kid who is failing Science and acting like a fool in class instead of asking for help needs some extra tutoring to solve that problem.  If the classroom is sacred for learning, then there needs to be a place for all the other services to happen.   And I am not talking about a nurse’s closet, an attendance clerk’s desk area or the guidance office.   Are you still thinking that the school is not the place for these types of services?   Think again.   Our classrooms are currently serving as many of these “offices” already and our teachers are doing it without a couch, a friendly receptionist or a bathroom.

Fourth, we have to allow school Guidance Counselors to be just that – the people who help kids get the best education they can get based on their their skills, their goals and their efforts.   Take all the social and mental health work away from the Guidance Counselors.

Finally, we need a superintendent or principal who is ready to be a disrupter for educational improvement.   What we are doing is not working.   We have to change it, and I think we need a BIG change – a disruption in business as usual.     We need a leader who is willing to change the system by changing the environment and the staff to meet the needs of the children.    If just ONE superintendent, or just ONE principal will create the space and hire the specialists, then he or she will be paving the way for others to follow.   It is NOT rocket science.  It is not even legislation.  A superintendent or principal can do these things RIGHT NOW.  TODAY.    It is a budget and space.  Money is a whole different issue, but a creative leader can find it or raise it.   I’ll bet money on that.   We need a leader who is willing make it happen.   We need a leader willing to make the classroom sacred.

And let’s talk about an ELEPHANT in the room.   We HAVE to make all these changes so that we can weed out the teachers who are themselves a part of the problem.   Yes, I said it.   There are teachers and guidance counselors who don’t belong in the education field, and they need to go.    In the environment I am advocating, the talented, dedicated teachers and counselors who are tired, broke and frustrated will find themselves re-energized and loving their jobs again when they know that they are coming to school to do the job they are trained for and the job they signed up for.   We will ALL see it ,and it will be a beautiful thing.    The small percentage of teachers who are failing our kids will stand out like a sore thumb.    Then we can let them go.

So let’s sum this up:  we need classrooms where teachers get to teach.   We need Social and Mental health workers using their own spaces to cover the non-educational help that our kids today need.   We need superintendents and principals who get it and aren’t rolling over or waiting for someone else to make it happen.

Public school needs to look very different.   Since we already expect kids to get everything they need at school, let’s just divide and conquer.   Let’s decide to do it right.  And let’s stop waiting for the government to make it happen.   One school, one district at a time we can make the change.   Let’s find the leaders who will make it happen.    No one can tell me we can’t do it.   No one.    This CAN happen.   Let’s do it.