Sometimes a Principal Has To Think Fast

Contrary to what most students think, principals can rarely “make you” do things. When students are told to do something, they always have a choice to do it or experience consequences. If they do as told, they may not experience as much of a consequence, but they can still make that choice.

Those of us in education rely on kids making the better (for us and them) choice. We don’t really want things to escalate and certainly were not interested in things getting physical. Unfortunately there were times when it did.

I won’t go into those difficult times when I felt I had to make that choice. However, I will share a time when I was confronted with an unwinnable situation.

While working as administrator in charge of daily activities (basically the principal) at the Area Vocational Center at Bloomington High School, I received a call for assistance from one of the Cooperative Work Training classes. These classes provided instruction as well as employment supervision of junior and senior students. A female student had lost her temper at her teacher and began to swear at him. She refused to leave the classroom, and I was called.

When I entered the classroom, she turned her anger towards me. I told her to come with me, she refused, turned the air blue with swearwords. I approached her and it got worse, and then she decided to run from the classroom and out of the building.

Normally this would result in a suspension of the student and a call to the parent. The problem was she ran to another school, Centennial Elementary School, which was down the hill from BHS. The school housed the Child Care program which was another AVC program. This program served 3 and 4 year children who received care and teaching from the high school students enrolled. The swearing student was duel enrolled as a student in the Child Care program. Counselors would sometimes do that.

I saw her enter the school as I followed down the hill. When I got to the door, I could see she had entered the Child Care classroom. As I approached she began again to swear at me. I stopped, but the swearing continued.

What was I going to do? The little children should not be exposed to this, but she was in the back of the classroom. If I tried to remove her physically, it would only get worse. If I let her stay, she would not cooperate with the teacher and there was possible risk of harm from such an angry student.

Then I got an idea. “Control what you can control”. “Remove her audience”. I quietly went to the teacher and whispered to remove her little students from the classroom, “like a fire drill”. She quickly had the students line up and start to leave as I stood in the doorway. As the entire class left, including the other high school students, only the angry girl remained in the back of the room.

Her audience gone, she did not know what to do. When I could see that all of the other students were safe, I stepped back from door and told her she was suspended. As I stood between her and the hallway full of little ones, she ran from the building.

I called her home to inform her parents of the suspension and informed Bloomington High School administrators. I never saw her again. I am sure BHS dropped her from both programs.

I am forever grateful that this situation did not get worse. It was the quick response by the Child Care teacher that got it resolved. I felt relief.

I added this method to my bag of tricks, and later found it useful when dealing with behavior disorder students who refused to leave a classroom. Fortunately that was a rare occurrence.