Meeting Article

Instead of letting students with a disciplinary problem sleep in late like on a normal Saturday morning, the Portsmouth School Board has other plans. 

At the meeting on Monday, the School Board proposed a new idea for students with a disciplinary problem.  School Board member Tim Steele wants to approve a new policy where students who have gotten into trouble during the week will have to return to school on Saturday morning at 8 a.m. for a four hour session of detention.

The newly proposed detention session would require about $3,000 extra in the budget to provide staffing to watch over the badly behaved students.

Portsmouth resident and parent, Peggy Bacon, disagreed with the proposed idea.  “I work six days a week – including Saturday morning,” she said.  “It’s bad enough to get my son off to school Monday through Friday.  Why should I have to worry about Saturday as well?”

“I know my son isn’t perfect,” Bacon said.  “But I’m not going to force him to go.  I just don’t think it’ll make any difference, and the parents are going to pay for it—in higher taxes as well as in ruined Saturdays.”

Steele believes that the new policy would reduce the number of in-house suspensions, which involves the misbehaved students to spend a day of school under supervision in an empty classroom.  “I know this isn’t good news for parents, but I hope the threat of Saturday classes will make the students think twice before breaking the school rules,” he said.

Portsmouth resident Bob Farley agreed with the proposal.  “Parents can whine all they want about this, but maybe it’s time parents in America were made to take a little responsibility for their kids,” Farley said.  “Maybe if they have to miss a few Saturday morning cartoons they’ll start wising up.”

Portsmouth senior, Lisa Gallagher, had another take on the new rule.  “In 12 years of school I’ve never served a detention, and I don’t intend to,” she said.  “But I don’t like this idea. I think it’s just being done to make life easier for the faculty, so they don’t have to deal with detentions during the week.  Anyway, what if someone skips the session? What are they going to do, make them stay all weekend?”

Steele said that if students decide to skip a Saturday detention session, it would result in the student being unable to return to school until the detention has been served.

Steele also said that smoking is the worst disciplinary problem they have in the school.  “I just want to keep students from smoking in the high school bathrooms.  There are other problems, but smoking is by far the biggest one,” Steele said.

The School Board ended up voting 5-3 on the new policy after plenty of discussion. 

Steele was told to return at the next meeting on March 7 with more information regarding in-school detentions so far for the current school year.