News Photo by Reagan Voetberg Alpena High School Dean of Students Eric Mitchell and Principal Romeo Bourdage discuss the In-School Suspension pilot program on Tuesday.

ALPENA — After gathering parent and staff input, Alpena High School Dean of Students Eric Mitchell and Principal Romeo Bourdage realized they needed another behavioral management option for students. Thus, the In-School Suspension (ISS) pilot program was born.

At the Alpena Public Schools Board of Education meeting on March 10, Mitchell and Bourdage announced that the program would launch the week after spring break.

The intention is for ISS to act as a bridge between lunch/after-school detention and out-of-school suspension. Parents have provided feedback saying that out-of-school suspension is not working. They do not want their kids at home during the school day. Many parents work all day, leaving their kids unsupervised. Students then use that unsupervised time to watch TV or play video games, which defeats the purpose of suspension.

With the ice storm and state testing interrupting the normal schedule, the ISS program has only had one week in which it’s been in use, Mitchell said.

ISS runs every Tuesday and Thursday. Students who are suspended will come to school as usual, but instead of following their normal class schedule, they spend the whole day in the ISS classroom.

Since it only runs two days a week, the high school cannot hire a person to run the room full-time. Instead, teachers at the school have committed to using their planning hours to monitor suspended students, Bourdage said.

Students in ISS have a limited number of breaks throughout the day. They turn in all their personal electronic devices, like phones and earbuds, into the office in the morning, Mitchell said.

Once in the ISS room, students participate in a behavioral module from Behavior Tech Kelly Heikkuri. Heikkuri has several modules prepared that she can assign to a student depending on the reason they were suspended.

The rest of the day, students are expected to study and catch up on their classwork.

“Here we like to say discipline is progressive,” Mitchell said. “You skip a class, you get a detention. We’re not just throwing you in (ISS). But if we’re consistently skipping the same class, and the detention didn’t work, the last thing I want to do is take you out of school so that you can’t get instruction. So this is kind of our step three for our progressive discipline now.”

The ISS pilot program is another gear in the cog of restorative practices and part of the initiative to ensure that kids stay in school.

“We want kids to realize the impact they have by doing anything that they do,” Mitchell said. “And then, moreover, making sure that we try to repair and restore the damage that we make.”

They have had six students in the ISS classroom so far. One student said they’d never do anything to get into ISS again, Mitchell said. Other students had a more positive experience.

“He said, ‘Wow, was this nice to be able to catch up on everything for six hours, and I had six different teachers that I could ask for help throughout this entire day,'” Mitchell said about one student. “…They were not irritated that they had an entire day essentially to work on school work.”

One behavior that teachers are noticing in students is apathy, Mitchell said. Students will come to class and not participate or pay attention. If they are handed a test or an assignment, they push it away and refuse to complete it.

It’s difficult for teachers to discuss the behavior with a student while monitoring the rest of the class at the same time. Mitchell has found that students are more open to talking about what is causing that behavior when they are in a setting like ISS.

“When they’re not in front of their peers, they’re not getting pulled out of class to talk to a counselor,” Mitchell said. “We have found that they are more willing to have these conversations when it is either one-on-one or they don’t feel like they’re targeted in any way.”

Mitchell and Bourdage discussed the future of the program as well.

“So that’s one of our pieces that we’ve got to look forward to,” Bourdage said. “How do we sustain this? Do we continue doing it the way we are, which, if it’s successful, I’d love to say do it for another year using our staff, see how it works, and then make a staffing decision moving forward.”

Reagan Voetberg can be reached at 989-358-5683 or rvoetberg@TheAlpenaNews.com.