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After looking at data and taking action, Hazelwood Central High School reports a 26 percent decrease in the number of discipline incidents at the school from this time last year. Central has the lowest rates of discipline incidents with one of the largest student populations in several years.

“Based on research, the things we are doing are working,” said Michael Mills, associate principal at Hazelwood Central. One of those things includes a freshman center.

“There was a direct correlation between failure rates and discipline. A lot of that was with our freshmen. They were accounting for half of our discipline. We analyzed our discipline last year and the majority of that was tardies and truancies,” Mills said. “We took that jump to create a freshman center based on the data and also so because we knew we were going to have close to 3,000 kids this year, which we did. Central’s official 2006-07 enrollment is 2,784 students.”

With the freshman center, Central located all of the core class areas in the middle of the building so the freshmen would not have to travel very far from their core classes to PE, fine arts, practical arts or the cafeteria.

“We asked for teacher-volunteers who were committed to ninth grade success and I had more volunteers than I needed,” Mills said. “We adjusted our schedules and we had probably 80 percent of our staff move their classrooms to accommodate this program, and they did so voluntarily. It was a logistical nightmare, and we worked on it all year last year. We also realized that by having teachers, particularly core teachers, in close proximity, we would naturally develop more communication among the ninth grade teachers, not just on discipline but on instruction, too.”

Mills said tardies are down because the student body is not moving as far.
“We are seeing improvement. The teachers are happier and students are also happier, because students want structure, and they like to know what the expectations are and they are clearly spelled out,” Mills said. “If the trend continues, we anticipate seeing our discipline rate go down even further this semester.”

Mills said teachers indicate the reductions in discipline by the entire student body had a positive impact on academics. He said the staff looks forward to analyzing year-end data.

Perhaps one of the greatest successes for Central has been in improving the overall school climate.

“Teachers reached a consensus on what we were going to work on this year before the school year started so we could all be on the same page and be fair and consistent. That was communicated to the students and to the parents and our climate has dramatically improved because of that,” Mills said.

“We’ve offered structure to our students that has an indirect effect on student achievement, and we are starting to see that with a reduction in failure rates school-wide. Our passing rate has increased in all departments and our failure rate has decreased in almost all departments.”

(story courtesy of Hazelwood Communications Dept.)

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