POTTSTOWN >> Bathroom and hall monitors, assigned cafeteria seats and additional adult supervision on the way home from school are all measures that have been implemented to get a better handle on misbehavior at Pottstown Middle School.
Principal David Todd outlined the changes for an audience of about 50 people Tuesday night, including staff and school board members in the second of his public community meetings aimed at addressing problems both inside the building and outside.
Last month, Todd held the first of the meetings and subsequent coverage in The Mercury also revealed deep dissatisfaction and a high turn-over among the teaching staff at the school because of misbehavior.
Some of that misbehavior has also been spilling into the streets after dismissal, The Mercury reported and Todd acknowledged.
Tuesday, Todd outlined a series of steps the administration has taken – both inside the building and out – to exercise greater control.
They include, among other things, a series of measures involving bathroom use, including a sign-in sheet and monitor for bathrooms “so we don’t loose track of kids after they leave the bathroom;” and no usage in the first or last 10 minutes of class.
The school has also reduced the time between classes to two minutes and hired a new hall monitor “to keep students moving on to where they need to be next,” said Todd.
In the cafeteria, seats have been assigned according to homeroom, students must have a pass to leave and the snack bar is not opened until later in the lunch period, encouraging students to eat a healthy lunch instead of just “throwing their lunch away and getting on the snack line,” Todd said.
Outside, “it has been clearly explained to students they have to stay out of the street,” and the students have been reminded to “stay off other people’s property,” said Todd.
He said the Pottstown Police informed him that in most cases, as the students get a few blocks from the school and begin to disperse to head to their respective homes, the problems outside the school tend to diminish.
Several times during the formal meeting in the auditorium and the informal workshop in the cafeteria that followed, the theme of teaching the students respect surfaced and re-surfaced.
One parent even suggesting putting the middle school students in a room and not allowing them to leave until they have written down their definition of respect so that the adults trying to teach it can understand how the children understand it.
“If kids learn disrespect at home from their parents, they’re more likely to use it at school,” she said, adding that a student forum might give adults insight into the students’ state of mind.
“We have a lot of adults in a room trying to figure out how to teach students respect when we don’t even know if they understand what it is,” she said.
Several of those types of measures are part of the “social and emotional learning” tools the district intends to bring into the middle school in full force next year, Todd told the group.
School board member Emanuel Wilkerson, who was a student government president at Pottstown High School before graduating, also suggested a student government be established at the middle school to give students a greater voice and teach them the proper way to be make themselves heard.
Taking that idea and pushing it out through social media platforms used by the students was suggested by another parent.
The work groups also came up with ideas for increasing parent involvement in the schools, volunteerism and the YWCA Tri-County Area and a male role model program called Watchdogs were also highlighted as being among the other community resources which have expressed an interest in getting more involved with middle school youth, Todd said.
In the end, he said, efforts have to be aimed at helping middle school students become successful adults.
“I hope you are here for the same reason I am,” said Todd, “that our kids are worth it, and their future is worth it.”
