With students due to return to school on Monday, Aug. 26, the Wilton Public School district’s newly crafted Code of Conduct will now begin appearing in the student handbook of rights and responsibilities.
Superintendent of Schools Kevin Smith said that, following “behavioral events of last year,” he had his building administrators at Cider Mill, Middlebrook and Wilton High Schools write and revise new student Codes of Conduct, which were then presented to the Board of Education in draft form in June.
“We’re trying to protect the environment and keep it safe for all kids … but also alert kids that there are real consequences for misbehavior,” he said.
At the same time, he said the guidelines are intended to have follow-up-related opportunities for students to learn from their mistakes, calling it “a pathway to forgiveness.”
“Kids are going to make mistakes,” he said. “They’re going to learn from those mistakes, and then they are fully reintegrated back into our school system.”
The 194-page handbook already offers an exhaustive outline of many areas of errant behavior based on a wide range of policies, including academic dishonesty, bullying, hate-based conduct, hazing, suspected abuse, and sexual harassment. There are also specifics on broader expectations, including a student dress and grooming code, and general standards of conduct.
“By publishing these frameworks around discipline, we’re hoping to help people see, here’s a behavior, here’s a consequence, here’s a restorative practice,” Smith said.
Frameworks for discipline are listed starting at page 117 in the full document, which is included below.
Part of the intention, he indicated, was to provide a general framework that gives parents and students a general idea of how specific situations would be handled by the schools. But the initiative is also aimed at indirectly providing news to the community following specific events in the schools, but without giving away personal details of those involved.
Smith pointed out that, following instances of inappropriate student behavior in the past, it was inappropriate for adults in the community to publicize and/or criticize students on social media channels, as has happened in Wilton. In that process, parents have also approached Smith with questions about repercussions of incidents, which involved information that he was not able to publicly provide.
“We’re not going to tell you any specifics about any one event,” he said, but these guidelines could answer some of the questions people may have relating to certain kinds of behaviors or incidents.
Smith told the Board of Education in June, “Philosophically, I think as a district, as we encounter really concerning student behavior across the board, and some really profoundly challenging behavior, we’re trying to reorient ourselves much more explicitly in what’s been described as a high support, high accountability paradigm.”
“At the end of the day, administrators also have discretion,” he said in June. “We have to rely on their professional judgment.”
“We can’t predict every possible occurrence, and so we default to professional judgment, and in that, it just has to be that way,” he said.
The BOE gave a positive response to the document in June, which is not solely viewed as punitive but also offers guidelines for educational redemption measures.
Smith said it will be the plan to have administrators have grade-level assemblies in which students will be introduced to the Code of Conduct after the start of school.
He said they would “walk them through … what these Codes of Conduct look like, what the expectations are, you know, and explain … be really explicit. This is how we hold students accountable.”
“This is new,” Smith said of the Code of Conduct. “It’s a change. We’re serious about it.”