Five policies for school boards to improve discipline

One year, I decided to write down bullet-pointed notes on all the chaos, violence, and disorder that occurred in my school: Two students held a peer against a wall while a third pummeled them in the face and stomach; another student beat up a special needs child on the bus; a girl brought a hammer to school but it was confiscated before she could use it. In the end, I stopped my note-taking exercise after two months because such occurrences became too quotidian. Too many other tasks demanded my time for me to bother documenting “another fight today.”