May 15, 2011Dear Sir,Regarding “Students suspended for ‘the wrong reasons” (Saturday, May 14), I was so frustrated by the Minister's comments I felt compelled to write a response. As an educator of more than 20 years and an administrator I feel the public needs to hear the other side of the spectrum. Obviously I would like my identity to be protected since it is illegal for teachers to speak out against the Ministry of Education. That is one of my responsibilities. Parents should be outraged at the amount of wasted time that is lost in the classroom setting dealing with students who disrupt the learning of those who want to learn. That should be the conversation here. I categorically deny at my school that students are just suspended for the heck of it. There are guidelines in place called the “Code of Conduct” that outlines such actions such as warnings, student conferences, parent conferences, detentions, behaviour plans, contracts, In School Suspensions and Out of School Suspensions. You put all these responses together that is a lot of time spent on several students in our care.I read with great care the Minister's comments and I noticed while she did not “condone” bad behaviour, she offered nothing tangible to address the problem of disruptive behaviour. I believe as of September 2011, TEC will no longer be an option for students who cannot function in the mainstream. I ask then what do administrators do with the limited resources we have now? Counsellors and educational therapists cannot handle the volume of students with these challenges. These students do not receive any proactive interventions. From my point of view, Student Services acts as a temporary hold until the next disruptive incident. If the Minister wants a solution to the problem she should allocate more funding for resources to assist these students in our care. I am the last person to want to turn my back on a young person getting a quality education. With the public school system constantly under the microscope we certainly don't need the Minister making blanket statements like the ones mentioned above. Those statements only serve to fuel the negative characterisation of our public system.I commend the stance of Kalmar Richards and Michelle Simmons who have a zero policy for certain behaviour. I would like to give administrators in our schools the benefit of the doubt that they are following protocol and are not as it has been suggested, just arbitrarily suspending students. I would suggest the Minister dig below the surface because she may not like what she finds. The issues educators are dealing with in schools are a microcosm of the bigger picture. We need a little bit more than the limited tools we have been given to address this.We are constantly inundated and being told that we need to raise standards. Remember we have a large number of our gifted and talented students who are prevented daily from maximising their true potential because their learning is disrupted and we are in fact giving a lot of our attention to the challenging ones. Food for thought.RAISING STANDARDSPembroke