Teachers in too many schools are confronted with too many students who have become disengaged from classroom learning. Re-engagement in classroom learning is the key to maintaining positive behavior. This issue of the quarterly newsletter of the Center for Mental Health in Schools includes the following features and regular segments: (1) Beyond…

Claims that Major Disciplinary Violations (MDVs) are incurred when students are truant, involved in fighting, insubordinate to faculty, or in possession of drugs. Presents data on students who received MDVs in a junior high school. Interviewed 17 students who had violated school discipline to gain insight into their behavior and needs. Recommends…

High School and Beyond data for 175 rural high schools suggest that creating larger institutions will increase student misbehavior. However, for small rural high schools, this increase will border the trivial. Decisions to consolidate schools should rest on criteria other than equity, efficiency, and its effects on student behavior. (RLC)

This research is a follow up to a similar study published by the Center for Rural Pennsylvania in 2003 in which researchers examined alternative education policies and practices among Pennsylvania school districts. The current study extended the previous research to include information on the perceptions of administrators and teachers on the…

The literature on school absences has focused predominantly on the reasons for student truancy, or it has assessed only aggregate student absences in their effect on achievement. However, this study brings forth a new issue: the relationship between types of absences--excused versus unexcused--and school performance. With a quantitative model of…

Students in the Newport News (Virginia) high schools who are absent from classes frequently without excuses or who are consistently disruptive are transferred from the regular program to an afterschool program that meets at a different site. These transfers are effective for at least 2 months and students may only be rotated back at the end of a…

Project Succeed is a program for helping failure- and dropout-oriented pupils to improve their school achievement. Attendance and assignment completion are the key behaviors for enhancing achievement. Behavior modification and communications procedures are used to bring about the desired changes. Treatment procedures include current assessment…

This special issue presents seven papers describing programs for children with behavioral disorders. Among topics addressed are use of role playing to foster social skills, truancy intervention, and cooperative efforts by mental health agencies and public schools. (CL)

A major problem faced by schools across the country is student absenteeism. Although the problem is pervasive in American schools, the attention focused on this issue has been inadequate. Poor student attendance has far reaching effects on the individual, the school, and society in general. The intent of this paper is to document the problem,…

The School Organization program of the Center for Social Organization of Schools is currently concerned with authority-control structures, task structures, reward systems, and peer group processes in schools. This report, prepared by the School Organization program, examines one aspect of authority-control structures in high schools--content of…

The courts have come to play an increasingly important role in educational policy making and the administrative management of our public schools. This is especially apparent in the context of school discipline where numerous and varied controversies have been translated into legal disputes over the past three decades, many of which have ultimately…

Family and demographic factors, such as parental deviance, disturbed homes, delinquent siblings, and poverty, are useful predictors that some form of childhood deviance will occur. They are not sufficiently specific, however, in predicting its quantity, variety or type. In this paper evidence is sought which would explain deviance in children as…

This study examined the form and availability of alternative education programs in suburban Cook County, Illinois, public secondary schools. Alternative education was defined as any special program that is directed to specific academic, emotional, and/or work training needs of students. A survey was submitted to school districts to gather…

Attempts to clarify the complex relationship between the identification of at-risk students and the ways educators try to retain them in school. Examines student problems from three different perspectives: the idiosyncratic, the sociocultural, and the institutional. Common student problems of learning, inappropriate behavior, depression, and…

This document is written to provide school administrators with an additional resource for notifying parents and teachers when school-age children are illegally absent from school or class by using student aides in the attendance office to assist in locating students, contacting parents whose children are absent, and providing the necessary…