Suspended Students May Be Sent to Club

Saying suspended students need help, Pleasant Valley Elementary School District board members tonight will review a proposal to use the Camarillo Boys & Girls Club as a facility for schoolchildren who have been ordered away from the classroom.

Howard Hamilton, the district’s associate superintendent, will ask the board to set aside about $60,000 for the program, which would address the disciplinary problems that lead administrators and teachers to hand out an estimated 500 suspensions a year.

Hamilton said about 50 students in the kindergarten through eighth-grade district account for the suspensions, and that they are issued for problems such as fighting, possession of weapons and insubordination. Suspensions usually range from one to five days.

“In many cases (suspended students) come from broken and dysfunctional homes, while in other situations they are just testing the waters--seeing how far they can go,” Hamilton said. “But just sending them home isn’t doing anything for them.”

Preliminary plans call for the program, which would be an alternative to traditional suspensions or expulsions, to focus on sixth- and eighth-grade students

Instead of being sent home once they are suspended, the students would go to the Camarillo Boys & Girls Club on Temple Avenue during the morning and early afternoon hours.

Under the proposal, students would attend structured morning classroom sessions with a teacher and afternoon sessions with counselors and tutors, some of whom would be volunteers from the community.

Jay Grigsby, the Boys & Girls Club’s executive director, said he is eager to work out further details on the plan with the school district.

“If they don’t come here they will be out on the streets or at home getting into mischief,” Grigsby said. “Either way they are not learning anything or changing the behavior that got them suspended in the first place. I think it would be wrong of us to turn our backs on them.”

The $60,000 cost of the proposed Program for At Risk Students would go toward salaries for the teacher and the aide. Hamilton is asking the board to study the proposal for possible funding starting with the 1995-96 academic year.

Dolores (Val) Rains, school board chairwoman, said she supports the program in concept but wants to make sure the district could afford the outlay of funds before giving it her endorsement.

“It sounds like a program with a lot of merit,” Rains said. “But we have to carefully scrutinize every expenditure before we can say yes.”

Hamilton said while the district receives no state funding for suspended students, it would receive funds under the program because the students would be in a structured classroom environment. He added that the district is also exploring the availability of certain grants that could pay for a portion of the program.

Tonight’s meeting starts at 7 p.m. at Camarillo City Hall, 601 Carmen Drive.