When does your school suspend or expel a pupil?

[pete]

At what point does your school dispense with "slap on the wrist" punishments and actually suspend or expel a student for vandalising IT equipment or breaching AUPs?

[Yesterday afternoon was spent repairing vandalism in one of our computer rooms. This annoys me.]

[alan-d]

Not really a problem of too much vandalism here, but each case is dealt with individually in proportion to the crime.

[GrumbleDook]

Vandalism of any equipment is a crime (Criminal Damage Act 1971 ... or under the amendments made in 1991). We issue a fixed period exclusion for it as part of whole school discipline irregardless of whether it is ICT equipment or other school property.

It is in our AUP as well but that is because negligent damage (rather than malicious damage that is vandalism) we usually issue an invoice to the family of the offending student as an alternative to the exclusion. We have a good success rate of this being paid and rarely have reoffenders.

[john]

Pupils get billed for damages, and after a few expensive bills word gets round that when we say break it and you will pay they believe us and then don't break it. Little acts of "children-ness" (that was used by a member of staff once that said X has just been playing with pennys in the CD Drive and shut it and they fell in it GRRR) get punished with IT suspension, so accounts disabled for a set period of time.

[pete]

From the tone of my original post, it may have appeared that we suffer a large amount of vandalism. This is not the case. What we do suffer from are "latest amusing things" to do in IT rooms, which while bloody annoying, aren't wantonly destructive. (search here for "poo" and "projector").

But occasionally it degenerates into mindless destruction, and I was wondering how much other schools tolerate before they break out the heavy larts.

[dezt]

The only instance i have come accross was when 2 kids stole 2 of the teachers laptops and were caught, I think they got a week holiday each for their troubles and because we got the laptops back no further action was taken.

1 Week suspension for stealing a laptop from school, great if they wanted some time away from school.

[webman]

The most we suffer is the occassional mouse going AWOL or being destroyed (snapped buttons, bent pins on the connector etc); or the removal of stickers from base units (usually being stuck on the bottom of mice!) We're also in the process of removing power to all oprtical drives due to kids stealing the rubber bands.

The only problem is catching the rascals - no per-room CCTV.

[Jake]

Not often enough

[Pottsey]

We take everything case by case and based on the students history. We sometimes charge and always charge them if it’s a repeat offence, even if its something we don’t really care about.