Chaos reigns at  Asbury Park’s Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School (MLKMS). Staff members tell NJ Education Report there are students who race down hallways, roam in and out of  classrooms, shove people in the stairwells, and threaten teachers and peers. In October two students jumped a teacher and punched him in the face, landing him in a hospital. How is this affecting the majority of students who are there to learn? According to last spring’s assessments in math and reading, 2% of MLKMS student are proficient in math and 8% of students can read at grade-level.  

Yet staff at MLKMS were feeling a little more optimistic last summer because principal Perry Medina had put together a schedule that carefully balanced the need for instruction and sufficient coverage during class, lunchtime, and recess. Then, one month into the fall term, the Superintendent’s Office “arbitrarily” decided to cancel Medina’s plan and switch to an 80-minute block schedule.  (The only exception is lunch, which is a 40-minute period: 20 minutes for “recess” and 20 minutes to eat.)

What does this mean for kids and staff members?  Now students have instruction in math and reading every other day instead of every day and 12-year-olds who might have enough trouble focusing for 40 minutes have to focus for twice as long.

To make matters worse, I’ve been told the Superintendent’s Office took away the option of in-school suspensions, the primary vehicle for discipline. Teachers are not allowed to lock doors and are supposed to summon security if behavior gets too wild. But not all classrooms have telephones and security in the building is unreliable. Instead every student—regardless of behavior or academic need —spends 80 minutes a day in a program called WIN or “What I Need to Know,” implemented before teachers had been trained in the program. (They had their first training session last month, with another scheduled for January.) WIN uses material from TeachRock, which defines itself as “improv[ing] students’ lives by bringing the sound, stories, and science of music to all classrooms.” 

Teachers say it’s a “glorified 80-minute study hall where no one actually studies,” another “kick in the butt” to students’ academic promise.

Teachers also say use of resources is “illogical,” with a teacher reportedly assigned to supervise a classroom with a single student while other classrooms “stumble along” without adequate supervision. (All this for $38,848 per student per year.)

According to several sources (who wish to remain anonymous), one of the most bothersome aspects to a disruptive, child-unfriendly culture is parents’ ignorance of in-school violence. That’s not the fault of the parents, I’ve been told, but of district leadership, which tweets “happy-talk nonsense” and doesn’t bother to inform parents when their children misbehave. 

Worth noting: at last month’s school board elections, the winners were a slate of candidates who declared, “we won tonight by a two to one margin because Asbury Park families demand thoughtful, transparent, and immediate change in our school district – for our kids, our teachers, and our entire community.” The new board members (two are incumbents) will be sworn in on Thursday, January 4th.