The ever-thoughtful Kim Moritz asks a great question today, whose rules — the teacher or the principal? She writes:

Nothing gets teachers hotter faster than the idea of CONSISTENCY. If we have a school rule, everyone needs to enforce it in the same way for all kids. NEVER HAPPENS in my seventeen years, teachers have different tolerance levels for all kinds of behavior.

This is a great question to explore, and it’s one that we grapple with at SLA. I really do try to give teachers space to make classroom rules, but there does need to be a balance.

Here’s the hard part, and Kim talks about it, once we decide on rules, we all have to enforce them, and in a small school, there aren’t that many folks. For me, if something affects the school outside the classrooms or the overarching school culture, we need a consistent policy, if it affects the way a teacher runs their classroom, teachers should be allowed the space to create their own classroom.

Stuff we’ve left up to teachers:
Homework / grading policy – with the exception of benchmark projects.
Classroom discipline policies
Classroom laptop usage

Stuff we have decided on together:
Lunch time student space policies
Lab coats policies
Non-classroom laptop issues (AUP, enforcement, etc…)

And some issues blur… with cell phones and iPods, we allow them in school, but we obviously frown upon kids using cell phones in class. But we also try to be humane. If a parent calls a couple times, such that it seems really important, teachers have been known to let kids answer, even though we tell the parents to call the school if it’s important. (Most do.) And with iPods, teachers decide when kids can and can’t use them. Some teachers are o.k. with kids doing writing with the iPod on, some aren’t. I’m fine with that.

And with all issues, we try to come to consensus on what our overarching policies will be. Every now and then, stuff comes up that need principal decision-making. For example, we never expressly forbid kids from ordering lunch for delivery in the school. So kids, of course, started ordering. I didn’t want to wait until our next staff meeting, so I said "No ordering food for delivery for lunch, unless you’re doing something with a teacher and the teacher orders the food." (Seems reasonable, right?) But hey, we might end up discussing it on Friday too. And sometimes I have to make judgment calls about discipline that not everyone likes, because we don’t have a "Mandatory Minimums" set of rules where Behavior X always invokes Penalty Y. And those times do cause a lot of conversation — often difficult — among all the stakeholders in our community.

But the overarching point is this… every conversation we have about rules and consistency and such is difficult and requires us all to listen to each other. And when we do need to come up with school-wide rules, we have to collaborate until we find a solution we can all live with and enforce.