Tim Leeds Havre Daily News tleeds@havredailynews.com
While a survey of Havre Middle School students asking how they felt about safety at the school showed some good results, it also showed some problems. “There are things I was pleased to see, others we need to deal with,” Dennis Parman told the Havre School Board during its meeting Tuesday. “ I think we can all agree on one thing. There are probably more questions to be answered.” Parman presented preliminary results of the confidential survey, given to the different grades at the middle school over the past two weeks, during Tuesday’s meeting. He said during and after the meeting that the Havre Public Schools will continue to look at the results of the survey and make changes in policy as necessary. The survey, which Parman designed using questions from surveys written by different organizations and educational clearinghouses, asked 47 questions related to safety, behavior, enforcement of rules and other issues. It was confidential, but asked the students their gradelevel, sex and ethnicity, allowing the results to be broken down into different groups. While 80 percent of the students surveyed more than 94 percent of the total student body who were present during the survey said they felt safe at school all of the time or most of the time, 17 percent said they felt safe sometimes and 3 percent said they feel safe not very often or never. But the question on bullying at the school resulted in a different kind of answer. “Only 6 percent of the students say bullying never happens. That’s a pretty small number,” Parman told the school board. About one-third said it happens occasionally but is reported and punished, while 28 percent said bullying happens sometimes but usually is not reported. About one-third of the students completing the survey said bullying happens quite a bit or happens a lot. Carol Prindiville said she believes that part of the problem was a lack of supervision of the students early in the year, which has gotten much better, she added. Students came from the fifth grade, where they are in a classroom with a teacher all the time and under constant supervision, to the sixth grade where they had almost no supervision, Prindiville said. “They come here and it’s like a freefor- all,” she said. Teachers from the middle school disagreed, saying there is supervision at the school, although Parman pointed out that some of the supervision they cited such as escorting students to and from lunch were recently implemented at the school. Prindiville said she only knows what her son tells her. “I can only be aware of what is happening in my house,” she said. One key is communication, Parman said. People who have problems should be talking to the faculty and staff first any paraprofessionals involved, then the teachers, then, if the issue is not resolved the dean of students and principal, and finally, if the issue is still a problem, the superintendent. Parman said the survey shows a perception that rules are enforced differently by different faculty and staff members and differently for different people. That could be caused to some degree by a lack of understanding of the rules, he said. The middle school uses a progressive discipline plan, where as students violate more rules they are put on higher levels of the discipline program, he said. That could result in two students who break the same rule even a fight between each other receiving different punishment. If that is the cause of the perception, it Could be solved by talking more with the students and their parents and making sure everyone understands the process, Parman said. “Fair is not equal. Fair is what is appropriate for each person,” he added. Other results on the survey included less than half of the students saying they had never been verbally threatened on school property, while 21 percent reported being threatened one time, 17 percent reporting two or three times and almost 16 percent saying they had been threatened at least four times. A disturbing response listed by Parman was that one-third of the respondents said they are not “able to control (their) emotions.” Barely more than half responded that the statement “I think about the consequences of my actions before I act” describes them well, with two-thirds of those students also saying they are not able to control their emotions well. “And we are the ones left to deal with this, in this environment, and we are charged to teach (these adolescents,)” Parman added. “I’m not trying to downplay this, but it’s pretty typical in a middle school environment.” The survey also showed that only half of the students surveyed said they “almost always” or “usually” talk to their parents if they have personal problems. More boys overall reported not talking to their parents, Parman said, although in the sixth grade the numbers of boys and girls making that response were about equal, in the seventh grade about two-thirds of the boys say they do not talk to their parents about problems compared to one-third of the girls making that response; in the eighth grade it reverses and two-thirds of the girls report not talking to their parents about problems while one third of the boys report the same. Parman noted that of the students who said they feel safe at the school, 44 percent also say they talk to their parents about problems. He said the survey also identified some possible trouble locations, with 11 percent saying they believe the hallways after school are not safe for them, about 10 percent saying bathrooms are not safe after school and 14 percent reported that the bus after school is not safe. “We think these are some hot spots,” Parman said. “If we provide supervision, we might be able to lessen those (concerns).”
